Raised Vegetable Beds: Organically Preparing the Soil for Planting

As a follow-up to my prior post about how to build raised vegetable beds, we are now organically preparing them for spring planting.

In the picture, the bed in the back is in the "before" stage and the bed in the front is in the "after" stage.

In the "before" stage, you can see that the box which was previously filled with compostable garden waste has settled about 6-12 inches over the winter. Some of the settling is due to the breaking down of the garden waste. The cover crop of winter rye was sown very late, in November I think. Over the winter it grew to about 6 inches tall.

In order to prepare the box for planting, I turned over the winter rye, then added bumper crop and top soil to re-fill up the box. Under this covering, the winter rye will decompose adding more organic material to improve the soil for growing vegetables.

Our vegetable plot is rather small for our family, but we hope through growing crops closely together that we will get some meals from the garden and a great learning experience for our children.