I didn't see the show, maybe I can DVR the repeat on Sunday to see what they look like. I use what is commonly called "raised row" gardening which sounds like it might be similar. I grow all my veggies in that way. It helps drainage, helps me keep from stepping in the row and compacting the dirt, and meant I didn't need to dig/till down as deep (lazy as I am!) to start my garden. Here is a pic, which is a little deceptive as I mulch the path between the rows with probably 6-10" of mulch so they look almost even with the rows, when in fact the rows are much higher than ground level.

Our lot is pretty sloped, that's the grassy hump you see in the foreground.

It works for me. This is the last bed I made. I plant 4 Old Timey Cornfield pumpkin seeds on it last year and got about 70 pumpkins, maybe a 1000 lbs. worth. This is the lowest spot on my lawn. The hole in the center was used as a pond to hold water. I mulched very well after planting. They ran out into the pasture and lawn.

Larry

Mound rows have been around for centuries, though I don't hear that name applied to them much any more. In recent decades they've more often been called raised rows or raised beds. They are the same thing as standard raised beds, but without lumber, stone or metal framing to hold the soil and keep in it place.

Mound rows offer the same benefits as raised beds---they warm up more quickly in spring since they are above grade level, and they drain more quickly for the same reason. Since you don't build any sort of framework around them to hold them in place, they are more flexible than standard, framed raised beds. You can rototill or rake your mounds flat every year and build new mounds in different sizes or configurations. The downside is that if you have torrential rainfall, the soil in the mound rows can erode away. One way to get around that is to mulch them well. Even then, though, wind or heavy rainfall may erode the soil and the mulch sometimes. However, even with clay soil, you'll rarely have to worry about the plant roots rotting in excessively wet soil because the mounds dry out more quickly, just like raised beds do.

Mound rows might be more helpful in some years than others. For example, in a year with non-stop torrential rainfall, they're great for plants because they keep their root zone mostly above grade level which can prevent the roots from rotting and from getting various diseases that come from sitting too long in soil that is too wet. On the other hand, in an extremely hot and dry year like we had in 2011 when some areas went months with little or no rainfall, a gardener might find that the mounds rows dry out too quickly than the adjacent nearby soil and needs to be irrigated more often. Much depends on the composition of your soil and how quickly or how slowly it drains.

My main garden is mostly framed, raised beds, but it didn't start out that way. The first year or two, there were only a couple of raised beds with everything else in mounded rows I raked into shape, and then every year or two we'd convert another area to a raised bed. Now, about 75% of that garden is raised beds, and the remainder is mounded most years. If I expect a very hot, dry year, I skip the step that includes mounding the soil, and leave everything at grade level.

My framed,raised beds are in the part of the garden that has heavy red, dense, slow-draining clay. The mounded areas are on the western and northwestern sides of the garden where a band of sandy-silty soil cuts through the clay. When it is hot and dry, mounds would dry out too fast and I know that for a fact because when it is hot and dry for a prolonged period, even the grade-level soil in the mounded bed area drains too quickly and is impossible to keep evenly moist. It is just really sandy-silty and no matter how much organic matter I add to it annually, it still dries out remarkably quickly. Thus, if I can correctly guess in late winter or early spring that a dry spring/summer lie ahead, I skip the mounding of the soil in those areas and plant in grade level hills or rows.

In two different years, we had such incredibly high rainfall that I mounded up rows of soil on top of the framed, raised beds, in effect building a free-style mound row on top of a framed, raised bed. I had to do that to ensure the tomatoes survived. I used that method in both 2007, when we had 9 or 10" of rainfall in May followed by over a foot of rainfall in June, and in 2009, when we had almost 13" of rain in one day, followed by another 6 or 8" over the next few weeks. Even with plants in mounds on top of the raised beds, the plants were too wet and stalled in their growth and productivity for a while. Without the mounds on top of the already raised beds, I doubt the tomato and pepper plants would have survived in those two years. I lost a lot of plants in 2004, which had similar weather in the spring, although the ones that survived produced well in late summer once they no longer were waterlogged.

For what it is worth, I always raise my onions in raised beds and they dogreat. Since most of our soil is heavy clay, it holds more water in spring than I'd like, even though it is well-amended. Planting the onions in a bed raised a few inches above the grade level of the soil ensures the onions won't rot in March, April and May if they are very rainy months. In 2010, which was really rainy for our area in the late spring and all summer, I still had some onions rot in raised beds. Usually, though, all the root crops I grow do better in raised beds than in grade level soil, and I imagine the same would be true for your garden if you decided to try mound rows, assuming you have anything other than pure sand. The key is that mound rows and raised beds, if composed of soil that drains really fast, may not hold moisture well enough in the hot months. So, you have to evaluate your soil and how well it drains vs. how well it holds water and decide what would work best for you. Heavily mulching raised beds or mound rows can help maintain moisture in the soil up to a point, but in a summer like 2012, there's not enough mulch in the world to keep the soil moist. Often, my raised beds don't even look raised because I have so much mulch in the pathways and on the beds. If it wasn't for the wood framing, you couldn't tell where the raised bed ends and the pathway begins. In the summers of 2012 and 2013, it stayed so dry and I piled up so much mulch on the pathways and on the raised beds that all the mulch ran together and (a) nothing looked raised and (b) the wood framing of the raised beds disappeared under the mulch so everything looked like mounded rows anyway.

Most of the people I know who use raised mounds in my area have very large gardens with clay soil and they plow the garden plot with a tractor,and then use various attachments pulled behind the tractor to rake the soil, mound it up, etc. Because only a small portion of my big garden is mounded up, I usually cultivate the soil with my Mantis cultivator, which works last year's now-decomposed mulch into the soil to improve drainage, and then I use a garden rake to rake up the mounded rows. At the west end of the garden, I usually plant tomatoes or peppers in the mounded rows and at the north end of the garden, I usually plant squash or melons since they thrive in the sandier soil. In alternate years when I plant corn at the north side of that big garden plot, I rake the soil flat and don't use mounds because the corn doesn't need them. I've never had soil so wet for such a prolonged period of time that it had an adverse effect on corn plants. The people who live near me who garden in sugar sand never use raised beds because their soil drains too quickly. If anything, they'd benefit from sunken waffle gardens instead of raised beds or mounded rows.

Dawn

Wow. That was incredibly helpful. Thanks LCDollar for asking and for everyone responding.

I have 3 mounds where compost has been dug in. It looks sandy. Didn't know what to do with them.