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Re: Natural Clay raised beds and quackgrass

Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html

Slightly raised beds can be made from soil only with no artificial border.
Details for various shapes are given in an old Rodale book, High Yield
Gardening, which like many Rodale books offers a cafeteria of different
ideas from different intensive growing systems, including Sq Ft.

I have both kinds of beds (or rather, several kinds of beds) in my garden
area, and plants are willing to grow in all of them.

Quackgrass is a tough nut and you should not attempt to rototill to try to
get rid of it, unless you are willing to take on a year long task of
rototilling and planting buckwheat three or more times, followed by winter
rye in the fall, and tillage of that the following spring.

Other wise rototilling quackgrass will just give you lots of little teeny
quackgrass plants, and they will all grow again.

The best way to remove quack is by double digging, which is a major
investment of labor. It can also be controlled by single digging (a fork or
a Garden Claw is a good tool for this) and thoroughly chasing down every
root you can find, and then following that up with rigorous weeding and
again getting all the roots whenever you see a shoot.

Mulching with boilerplate might work, but it will penetrate lesser materials
<grin>.

On the up side, quackgrass leaves dried and powdered can be a useful slug
killer and repellent, dusted around susceptible plants.

Anyway, good luck with stand alone raised beds, they work fine....and good
courage in the battle with quackgrass!

Frank Teuton


>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Teri Epp" <kitty@cwnet.com>
>To: "Square Foot Gardening List" <sqft@listbot.com>
>Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 9:04 AM
>Subject: Re: Natural Clay raised beds and quackgrass
>
>
>> Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html
>>
>> Charlie- I have areas that have this clay too and you can actucally mold
>it
>> and make things with it! Luclily it is about 1foot down and is covered by
>> hard pan(!) when has been removed mostly and amended with all of the ggod
>> stuff. I don't see why this would work- the water just seems to sit there
>> doesn't go down for days- have tried adding gypsum and everything I could
>> think of to make it into real soil- to no avail- so just make mostly
>sunken
>> or rasied bedsand hope nothing  needs to go deeper than about 2 feet.I
>read
>> where if you add sand it becomes like concrete- . Hmm- Clay- plus sand in
>> raised beds=permanent(almost) borders??Anyone tried this? The only thing
I
>> can think of(not that I know that much about gardening) is that the
darned
>> quackgrass is rooted there and is there to stay.Istay it seems- Too bad
we
>> can't eat that stuff.It just pushes up thru my newspaper and leaves and
>> straw like it was nothing- Suggestions on how to manage it? More compost
>> just seems to encourage it!-Teri
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: ...Charlie... <csimpson@preferred.com>
>> To: Sqft <sqft@listbot.com>
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2000 6:17 PM
>> Subject: Natural raised beds
>>
>>
>> > Square Foot Gardening List - http://www.flinet.com/~gallus/sqft.html
>> >
>> > I am trying the following method to provide "sides" and "ends" to my
>> raised
>> > beds. I have rototilled several 3' wide by varying length beds to a
>depth
>> of
>> > 12 or so inches. I then "pulled" with a hoe, the soil, into "banks"
>about
>> 6"
>> > high, to form the borders, next I filled these depressions with compost
>> > thereby creating "natural" raised beds. Since my soil is red clay I
>expect
>> > the borders to harden rather like adobe. Will let you all know how this
>> > works out.
>> >
>> > Charlie
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