Oh, Baby, I Don’t Want to Settle
Sounds like a country song, doesn’t it? Well, same gist… it’s breakin’ my poor little heart.
As it’s rained and I’ve watered it and things grow up in the raised bed, the settling is getting to the point where it could be deemed “significant”. In fact, in some places, the rasied bed has settled by over six inches. The structure’s only 20 inches deep, so losing six of twenty inches to either leach, plant absorption, or whatever is giving me a “!!!” reaction.
The top board is a 2x4.
As I rotate crops in the next few weeks (getting rid of the cauliflower that hasn’t headed, for instance) I’ll be pulling the bark dust out for the most part, and working a bit of manure/hummus mix from the garden center and peat moss into the soil, and it’ll be mounded all the way back to the top of the pile!
I’m dealing with the same issue right now. I’m interested in knowing how this works for you, and exactly what process you go through around the plants you do leave in the bed. Good Luck to you!
Leaf, I’ll post pictures tomorrow, but I have a few different techniques so far.
In one area, I have onions that need to stay where they are… but are perfectly happy to be flooded with water. In that case, I put in a divider and mounded the dirt high on the side of it that was vacant. When I water, the water will flow out of that area and into the onions, but they’re fine with this situation.
In another area, I couldn’t use that solution because the plants are water-sensitive — strawberries and push cucumbers. There were also tomatoes in that section. They don’t like being flooded … in fact, it killed the cukes.
What I ended up doing was leaving the tomatoes in place and transplanting the strawberry plant out temporarily along with most of it’s root ball. I might lose this growing season, but I won’t lose the plant… then I mounded the dirt as high as I could, burying the tomato plants a bit (they lost about four inches of stem, but they’ll root out along that four inches, so I just gained four inches of root depth and a lot of wind stability…) and then replanted the strawberry right in the middle of a nice big hill.
I’ll have pictures soon. It’s been thunderstormy here, so I haven’t had the opportunity to be out digging much.