4. Raised Beds
When I first heard the term raised beds, my mind raced to multiple berths in World
War II troop ships and then straight on to wooden-sided grow beds made with
railroad ties (so popular in urban landscaping in the 1970s) or even adobe bricks.
But my friend Scott Titus isn’t at all shy about any of his choices. “I won’t have
a piece of stone in my garden, and I also avoid large lumps of wood,” he de
clared. “Keep it as natural as possible. Build the beds with earth. It’s much easier to
manage.”
And so out went the Better Homes and
Gardens–inspired brick or crazy paver path
ways; the 2-foot-wide pathways between
the beds would be covered in 2–3 inches of
cedar sawdust. The beds would be a reach
able width, which to my stretch (with a
moderately poor back) was 3 feet.
Our plot of land enjoys mostly all-day
sun, except a small shed casts some shade—
perhaps the right place for peas and lettuce?
Around this neck of the woods (why
do we say neck?), folks try to get their veg
etable starts in the soil around Memorial
Day (in late May), and this became our
goal.
We drew out a plan (see the illustration on page 25), drove in some stakes at
carefully measured intervals, strung some line, and began to fork the somewhat
dried-out earth into heaps, which began to take on the shape of raised beds.
It was at this stage that I fully understood Charles Dudley Warner’s 1870
dictum: “What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge on it.”
Scott Titus brought the saying up-to-date with his take on the labor of digging :
“I take three Tylenol before I begin!”
My efforts paled alongside those of Scott, who appeared to be tireless and at24 • GROWING AT THE SPEED OF LIFE