Southwest Florida Gardening

Most of what I learned about raised bed gardening came from Mel Bartholomew’s book “Square Foot Gardening”. His methods work, what more can I say. And, they are especially helpful here in southwest Florida where we don’t have soil, but only just sand.

You can work for years to “build the soil” in your chosen garden site or you can work for a few hours and have the best soil possible. Being a lazy sort, I always opt for the few hours method.

One of the better bits of advice in Mel’s most recent rewrite of his book is his formula for making the soil used to fill your raised bed. Here it is, to help you get started in the shortest time possible. You can buy just about everything you need at the local Home Depot, if you want to go that route, and have your garden built and planted in an afternoon.

Here’s the recipe for Mel Bartholomew’s garden soil:

1/3 blended compost (your own or purchased)
1/3 peat moss
1/3 coarse vermiculite
Mix equal parts of each, measured by volume, not by weight.

That’s it. A perfect soil mix that you only have to do one time. You never have to replace it in your raised bed but only add some compost each season, as a top dressing.

Now, here’s HOW you do it.

• You’ve built your raised bed, probably 8 ft long by 4 ft wide.
• You’ve decided where you want it to be, making sure it will get at least 6 hours of sun every day
• You’ve put down a sheet of weed block cloth that is slightly larger than 8 ft by 4 feet
• You’ve placed your raised bed framework on top of the weed block cloth

Now get a large tarp, one that is at least 16 x 16 feet. Open it up near your raised bed and gather the bags of soil ingredients we discussed earlier.

Count out the bags (each probably contains something like 40 quarts or 1 cubic foot, which are volume measurements). Make sure you have them in the ration of 1/3… 1/3… 1/3… according to the recipe.

Once you’re satisfied that you’ve done the math correctly and you have the right quantities of each ingredient, simply start opening the bags and dump them into the center of the tarp. Mix the ingredients roughly as you dump them and be careful not to walk on the materieals.

Once you have everything dumped out and somewhat mixed, it’s time to get serious about the blending. An easy way to do it is to drag two corners of the tarp to the oppose two corners. The material will roll over on itself, mixing nicely. When you’ve pulled those corners to the point where the dry materials are almost to the edge of the tarp, move your body 90 degrees, grab those two corners and repeat the process.

Just work your way around the tarp, repeating the corner pulling technique until your soil is completely blended. It’s finished when you don’t see any individual ingredients or single colors.

Now use your hose with a fine mist or spray to wet down any dust. Don’t spray so much that you have puddles – you just want to settle down the dusty parts. Also, if you get it too wet, it will become too heavy to handle easily. Remember, we are all about lazy here and there’s no point in breaking our backs trying to move saturated soil mix.

Do NOT walk on the soil mix or let the kids play in it. You don’t want to crush the particles of vermiculite. That would destroy their water holding capabilities.

Now use the soil mix to fill your raised bed. As you get a good layer in the bed, wet it down with the hose. Repeat this process until the bed is full. Don’t worry about packing it down. In fact, DON’T pack it down! It will settle just right all by itself.

If you have any of the soil mix left, just shovel it into the empty ingredient bags and label it so you don’t forget what’s in it. That extra soil will come in handy for transplanting or for topping off the raised bed if the soil level settles too much.

Now your raised bed garden is ready for plants.