 |
| The Gardener. Johannes Hubertus Cuypers, 1858 |
The plants love these beds just as much as beds with borders. Why make cedar raised beds or square foot garden beds with pressure treated lumber when you can just dig mounded beds like these? It’s so easy – and I find these easy raised beds are better when it comes to weeding as well. There’s no wood for the weeds to work themselves in around.
If you’re looking to try something new in your spring gardening and haven’t built this style of mounded bed before, I encourage you to give it a try. This is about the easiest garden you can make and it’s free. I don’t see the need to spend money on borders anymore. I just make neat mound gardens and plant them up. The vegetables make them beautiful.
DAVID THE GOOD
Once upon a time, I gave my brother a visit. On this visit, I took a look at his microwave safe dishes. They were actually the plastic bowls from store bought microwave meals like Lean Cuisine. He would take the bowls and wash them out and reuse them. I was impressed with the ingenuity and frugality of this "white trash option."
I also use white trash options in my life. Mrs. Peasant uses my empty peanut butter jars as containers for other things like instant mashed potatoes and grits. With the lasagna garden method, we use cardboard from Amazon boxes and brown paper grocery bags from town as the weed suppressant layer. The Peasants are all about deriving treasure from trash.
David the Good has a similar mindset on these things. For instance, he eschews raised beds for gardening and prefers borderless grocery row gardens. This method is much cheaper than buying raised beds from Vego. Wanting to save some money, I put down two lasagna garden beds straight on the ground. The results for us were lackluster. Weeds and grass quickly took over these ground beds. We got a couple of watermelons, but the whole thing looked horrible and chaotic. It was an educational experiment, but I have resolved to stick with those raised beds from Vego even if they cost a fortune.
Mrs. Peasant needed some trellis options for her tomatoes and cucumbers. The white trash option for trellising was to take sticks and make teepees with the ends lashed together. These worked fine until the winds kicked up and blew the homemade structures to pieces. I had to go out every time after a storm and reconstruct those teepees. It was aggravating.
They have a saying on CB radio. "Stop crying and start buying." This is what they say to each other when their rigs are giving less than the desired results. Similarly, we were crying until we started buying tomato cages. I don't play with the sticks anymore. Those cages have done awesome for us, and we have resolved to always buy them and use them. They are expensive because they are worth it.
I appreciate David the Good's tips and whatnot, but I need my gardening to be easy. I don't have a surplus of time and energy. I consider the money spent on proper tools and structures to be good investments. We believe in the motto of "buy once, cry once." White trash gardening is a cheap way to go, but you still end up paying for it in frustration, aggravation, and wasted energy.
Thank you for reading!
 |
| Briton Riviere - The Old Gardener, 1863 |
