William, do you think that the raised beds make gardening chores easier.....once they are built?

Another question you may have already told us, did you buy potting soil to fill them?

They look very tidy and sturdy.

gldno1- these beds in front of the porch were put in for a coupla different reasons. when we bought the house there were no gutters and all the water from the front roof was flowing under the porch. i was concerned about mildew and fungus. the other reason, there was no flower garden for my wife. they are very sturdy. thy are about 16 ft long and 12 inches deep by 30 inches wide. i filled them with humus, aged manure and topsoil that i bought in bags. a total of 1600 lbs. cost was about 48 bucks. if i had used potting soil the cost would have been about 160 dollars. the beds are about 40 cubic feet.
my take on raised beds is that after they are installed you have to maintain them with round up to prevent the bermuda grass from coming up through the bottom. plus a little weed wacking and a push mower. i also put weed blocker on the bottom but that doesn't stop bermuda. so they are not work free but you don't have to be weeding all the time which is nice.
hope this helps.

william

Nothing helps with Bermuda! I just pulled yards long pieces of it from beneath my mulch. Where I killed it out last year with herbicide, it has spread to double where it was before.
I don't know where the danged stuff came from. When we moved here in 1991, there wasn't any. Now I even have a huge patch of it in the west calf lot! It's as bad as Kudzu.

Thanks for the info on the beds. I was thinking of just a small one for carrots. They don't do well in rocky soil or hard soil.

It looks very neat. I don't see one weed. Your wife is lucky to have someone to make flower beds for her. This mixture of bagged material has lasted several years? Are you renewing it with your leaves, manure and molasses mixture?

yes helen. we amend with something every yr. i am a big fan of leaf mold. probably goes back to my childhood.
am "fixin to" do the molasses trick in the next coupla days.

william

That looks great William! It looks well taken care of and really adds to the front of your home.

You have a nice home, and the raise beds look very nice in front of the porch. What is the molasses trick? Does it speed up decomposition of the leaves?

Yes...what is the molasses trick? Something new to enlighten my gardening world maybe......

i brew a tea with alfalfa pellets and molasses that is supposed to feed the micro herd. molasses has about 50 trace nutrients, i think.
william