My dad gave me my grandpa's copy of "Better Vegetable Gardens the Chinese Way," by Peter Chan, a month or two ago. I love it. It's a big floppy paperback from the 1970s. Peter Chan's method is to create simple raised beds, no wooden borders or any construction to worry about, just simple, tidy earthen mounds with shallow drainage trenches around the perimeter. The writing is simple and accessible, the tone is gentle and helpful. My grandpa was a Master Gardener in the later years of his life, and the book has some great marginalia. Well, not marginalia so much as highlighteralia.
My favorite is where Peter Chan describes creating the raised beds by removing the grass and rocks, then turning compost into the soil and shaping the soil into a neat, nicely mounded bed. Right there, at the end of the paragraph, the last sentence is highlighted in yellow: "Silvia does a lot of the digging, too." I love it.
I made my first raised bed a la Peter Chan yesterday. I staked the grass into 3x9' rectangles, ran some twine around the perimeter, and dug in. It's been raining (a lot) in the last week or so, so the ground was nice and soft. There's something so satisfying about feeling the shovel break through that tough mat of grass. I turned the sod over, shook out the loose soil, and dumped in in the compost heap. Then I worked in some loose topsoil (actually, the stuff we hauled out of the basement while working on the bay window, but that's another story altogether) and a bag each of Whitney Farms compost and chicken manure. I'm not sure if the proportions were right, but I guess we'll see.
With that, the bed was ready. Racing against the approaching rain, I transplanted some of the Galena pea volunteers that had sprung up in the neighboring bed--I'd grown them during the spring, and had rededicated the bed to swiss chard, favas, and cauliflower for the fall. I didn't have the heart to tear out to volunteer peas, so I decided to give them a bed of their own. I also transplanted some Merlot Lettuce starts from the nursery, and one last cauliflower. And then ran inside to get out of the rain.
