Hello

[misfitmorgan]

Thought I would join over here from BYH because we are thinking about re-doing our garden tech by changing to raised beds for most things and taking down some of our apples trees to put up other fruit trees. As well as making strawberry beds, berry bushes, and an herb garden. Also need to re-do our flower beds. So I thought we would come over here and share the journey while meeting some new folks.

 

[flowerbug]

i love it here, welcome! also have just discovered sufficient self and like it there too.

my advice is pretty opinionated on the idea of formal raised beds and, well, most hardscape in general is, don't do it if you can help it.

the amount of expense and effort to make a raised bed is negated by the inflexibility, expense and more added labor it means.

if you do need a raised bed you can informally do the same thing by piling up dirt, tamping down the edges and then mulching them or leaving them bare (depending upon how much wind, rain you might get and your general layout or desires). then at the end of the season if you want to change anything or do something different you don't have to tear out a hardscape project.

we started with a lof of small gardens and raised beds - needed because of flash flooding, but as time has gone on i've taken out as many extra pathways and tried to consolidate gardens because it is much much easier to take care of larger gardens and a lot more flexible and useful of the space too. pathways to me are a waste of space. once i have a bigger area mostly planted i will also plant any path i might have been using to get in and out. keeps more weeds down and is more productive.

my thoughts of the moment. good luck.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Welcome, glad you joined. I think you'll find us a relatively small relaxed group that may have different opinions but are pretty respectful and friendly. Just pull up a chair, grab an appropriate beverage (coffee for me), and make yourself to home.

I'm a little more flexible. We've all got different circumstances and goals so different things work better for different ones of us. Some of us do the old traditional turn it every year, some do more of a no-till, many use raised beds, some do a lot in containers. Some start plants ourselves, some buy transplants. Whatever way you want to try you'll find someone on here that has done it.

Tell us a bit about yourself, where you are and what you have to work with. We love photos.

 

[flowerbug]

Welcome, glad you joined. I think you'll find us a relatively small relaxed group that may have different opinions but are pretty respectful and friendly. Just pull up a chair, grab an appropriate beverage (coffee for me), and make yourself to home.

I'm a little more flexible. We've all got different circumstances and goals so different things work better for different ones of us. Some of us do the old traditional turn it every year, some do more of a no-till, many use raised beds, some do a lot in containers. Some start plants ourselves, some buy transplants. Whatever way you want to try you'll find someone on here that has done it.

Tell us a bit about yourself, where you are and what you have to work with. We love photos.

lol, ridge you are so much more diplomatic than i. lol but yes, i do agree with you.

 

[misfitmorgan]

I do understand the aversion to raised beds, I at one point in time thought there were a dismal waste of time just so things looked pretty.

We are not planing to do traditional raised beds, basically we are going to be doing collapsible frames that "lock" together and stack up. Some will be 2-3 frames high and others will be more like raised garden box. We are hoping for between knee and waist height. These would be set outside of our current garden, so we would still have a regular till garden for pumpkins, corn, squash, cucumbers, etc.

The basic goal is this I'm 35 and at 15 I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that affects my joints and muscles. For about the past 2yrs I have had a really hard time getting up and down from the ground or even sitting/kneeing on the ground for long periods of time. It's not that I can't it just feels like my muscles are on fire and my joints ache. I have never taken any medications and won't for as long as I can. So long story kinda short....I'm trying to find a way of gardening without wearing myself out for 2 days after every time i need to weed, plant, or harvest.

On top of that my DH also has an auto-immune disease.....so we both need things a little easier to continue doing what we love.

I would be game to try the pilling up dirt method but I don't think we could get it tall enough without having sloping sides which won't work for us.

We live in Northeastern LP of michigan, the we being me and DH. As mentioned I am 35 and he is 39, we bought a house with 12 acres 2 yrs ago. We have pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and geese currently and hope to get rabbits and two calves in the spring. Our house animals are 3 dogs and 4 cats.

The property came with flower beds around the entire house, a back patio garden, lilac grove, purple sandhill cherry tree, asparagus patch, grape vines, rhubarb bed, snowball bush, a very large rose bush, 18 apple trees and 1 cherry tree. I don't really have pictures of anything atm I don't think.

 

[flowerbug]

thanks for the context.

i am also somewhat disabled. i work a lot in gardens and any time i have to do close to the ground things i have a ground pillow that i sit on and work from. i actually now have three ground pillows so if i happen to want to stretch out and watch some clouds i can do that (i haven't often but i like the option). we joke often about the nice swing or benches here that we never really use.

sorry to hear about the problems with the autoimmune diseases. i do have some sympathy with that and also wanting to avoid certain medications. more on this in other threads i've already written a lot on so i won't repeat that here other than offering my sympathy and *hugs*.

note that if you are doing certain things that are difficult perhaps there are other ways of doing it that will work. so please bring them up in a thread or someplace and i'm sure some of us can talk about it and maybe save you some efforts/expenses/pain. i know i'm not the only person here on TEG who operates on a partial number of cylinders.

 

[digitS']

Welcome to The Easy Garden, MisfitMorgan.

It looks like you have lots of things to take care of. Critters! I can understand hoping to have additional varieties of fruit. Those 18 apple trees could amount to a commercial orchard!

I can also understand mobility problems. I had/still have rheumatoid arthritis. My hope is that you will experience less problems through your next few years, as I did. Flare-ups decreased from what I had experienced earlier.

Some fresh air, healthy food ... you are on a good track.

Steve

 

[ducks4you]

from Central IL!! THANKS for posting your location, bc that Really helps us when you know your zone. Are you zone 3?

 

[misfitmorgan]

thanks for the context.

i am also somewhat disabled. i work a lot in gardens and any time i have to do close to the ground things i have a ground pillow that i sit on and work from. i actually now have three ground pillows so if i happen to want to stretch out and watch some clouds i can do that (i haven't often but i like the option). we joke often about the nice swing or benches here that we never really use.

sorry to hear about the problems with the autoimmune diseases. i do have some sympathy with that and also wanting to avoid certain medications. more on this in other threads i've already written a lot on so i won't repeat that here other than offering my sympathy and *hugs*.

note that if you are doing certain things that are difficult perhaps there are other ways of doing it that will work. so please bring them up in a thread or someplace and i'm sure some of us can talk about it and maybe save you some efforts/expenses/pain. i know i'm not the only person here on TEG who operates on a partial number of cylinders.

Thank you for the reply, I will surely share here if we are trying to solve any problems or get ideas.

We are basically making pallet collars then stacking them. They look like this
https://www.uline.com/Product/Detail/S-18394/Wood-Crates/Pallet-Collars-48-x-40-x-8?pricode=WB1163 But we are not paying that price

We are buying just the hinge parts
https://www.pennelcomonline.com/en/...PSkV_dbM8iZLkTb69h97RrjDJ1C0N6I8aArPpEALw_wcB
So $7/collar we already have the wood, DH gets it free from work. Those hinges are cool, I have seen another person do this same thing. The frames can fold flat and each row locks to the one below it. Another convient thing is if you need a high bed but the plants( like herbs) only need shallow soil you can stack up a frame or two then put a sheet of plywood on top and one more frame so you only need to put soil/compost in the top frame. They are also very strong when build with 3/4" wood and light weight.

Welcome to The Easy Garden, MisfitMorgan.

It looks like you have lots of things to take care of. Critters! I can understand hoping to have additional varieties of fruit. Those 18 apple trees could amount to a commercial orchard!

I can also understand mobility problems. I had/still have rheumatoid arthritis. My hope is that you will experience less problems through your next few years, as I did. Flare-ups decreased from what I had experienced earlier.

Some fresh air, healthy food ... you are on a good track.

Steve

The apple trees were here when we bought he place of course however the previous owners who loved gardening had health problems the last couple of years so nothing had been pruned the last 3-5yrs including the grapes which went crazy. We pruned half the grapes last year and over winter the arbor half collapsed so we have to figure out how to re-do the arbor without completely cutting back the grapes to nothing. The poor apple trees were so out of shape we ended up pruning them out of season and still lost several large branches.

The varieties we have identified so far are:
Honeycrisp
mac
transparent
red delicious (3 trees)
pink lady
gravenstein
The rest we dunno. The amount of apples is ridiculous so much so we feed 100lbs a day to our livestock and still have more. We plan to take out all 3 red delicious because we are not fond of that variety. Plus a few of the other trees need to go since we dont like the flavor of those apples and they are way past pruning at this point. We plan to plant 1 granny smith tree so we should be down to 6-8 apple trees.

We want to then plant 2 pear trees, 2 black cherry trees, a nectarine tree and 2 plum trees and maybe a couple peach. It's going to be done in stages over a few years I'm thinking.

from Central IL!! THANKS for posting your location, bc that Really helps us when you know your zone. Are you zone 3?

No we are zone 5B, the coldest we get is northwest upper pen and thats only 4A

 

[valley ranch]

Greetings misfitmorgan ~ Pictures misfit ~ we gottta have more pictures ~ glad to see the pictures you dis post ~ laying on the ground watching the clouds sounds nice now ~ when I was little ~ I was laying on a bunch of gunny sacks ~ at the folks ranch ~ watching the clouds and the world and trees began to spin and turn and I thought I would fall off the earth ~ I got up and ran into the house ~ Never told anybody about that until just now ~ You'll not mentioned that to the others OK ```

Oh, and thanks for coming by ```

Richard