Just finished building my four 4'x8'x20" raised beds

Your garden is growing so nicely. Love all the green and now the red.....and that unusual purple.

Thanks everyone. In addition to the purple cayennes, I now discovered one of my plants is growing yellow cayennes. I love the colors.

What size pvc pipe did you use for the support and in the box itself. Wonderful garden. I love it.

adutton to SFG forum. I just noticed you had made your second post.

Kelejan

adutton wrote:What size pvc pipe did you use for the support and in the box itself. Wonderful garden. I love it.

The hoops are definitely 1/2" and i'm pretty sure the larger tubes inside the bed are 3/4". Just make sure they fit inside each other at the store though.

I know this is an old post, but man, are these beautiful gardens! way to go! Are you still around? Gardening??

southern gardener wrote:I know this is an old post, but man, are these beautiful gardens! way to go! Are you still around? Gardening??

Yup, still here and still gardening! Growing lots of greens right now which i'm using for juicing, but i'm already excited about my plans for next spring too. I plan on experimenting with densely packed texas tomato cages so I can see what happens. This year I harvested around 300lb of tomatoes! I'm hoping next year will be even better

ASFx wrote:Yup, still here and still gardening! Growing lots of greens right now which i'm using for juicing, but i'm already excited about my plans for next spring too. I plan on experimenting with densely packed texas tomato cages so I can see what happens. This year I harvested around 300lb of tomatoes! I'm hoping next year will be even better

How many tomato plants did you need to get the 300lbs?? That's incredible!

What varieties??

Inquiring minds wanna know!!

that's amazing! any new pics to share??

Those are beautiful gardens, and holy mackeral 300#'s of tomatoes! That is awesome.

Man I can't wait for spring8)

Too Tall Tomatoes wrote:

How many tomato plants did you need to get the 300lbs?? That's incredible!

What varieties??

Inquiring minds wanna know!!

It really was incredible! I wasn't expecting nearly that much. I had to be very creative with how I used them all. We made many gallons of salsa, tomato sauce, and dehydrated tomatoes. We also ate quite a few tomato sandwiches.

My top performing varieties were: Hawaiian Tropic, Porter, Gardener's Delight, and Heatwave II. The porter tomatoes aren't necessarily marketed as a heat tolerant variety, but they did extremely well regardless. The gardener's delight produced a massive amount of cherry tomatoes, but I think I may not grow them again, just because it was so time consuming. I literally hard to spend about an hour harvesting them every single day, otherwise the birds would start eating them and spreading seeds all over. They all tasted great! I used the normal mel's mix soil combined with my own homemade compost, Azomite rock dust, and Mykos mycorrhizae. I highly recommend the Azomite rock dust if you can get ahold of it. It really does improve the taste of just about everything. I really understand the importance of re-mineralizing the soil now.

southern gardener wrote:that's amazing! any new pics to share??

The pics I posted in June were the last ones I took unfortunately. I've been so busy with work. Currently my garden is still in transition to my cool season crops, so it's not much to look at yet. I'm super excited about my plans for next spring already, and i'll definitely try to take more pics, and some video too

nKedrOoStEr wrote:Those are beautiful gardens, and holy mackeral 300#'s of tomatoes! That is awesome.

Man I can't wait for spring8)

Thanks! Gonna try to hit even more than that next year. I never realized how much food could be produced in just four 4x8 raised beds. It's pretty amazing

Thanks for the info ASFx. I just love hearing about tomato successes

Hey Jason,

I was wondering how you made out with the corn from way back at the beginning of this thread. I planted half a 4x4 box in corn and while it grew really tall and looked great I got very small corn cobs. I don't think I had enough to pollinate. I'm trying to decide on whether or not to dedicate space to corn again.

Love your garden and all the info you have shared from your research. The videos are great, hope you post more from this years journey.

Thanks
Sean

Where do you order your Hawaiin Tropic tomato seeds. The only place I have seen to order these is sweettomatotestgarden.com. But I do not know anything about this company. They look like they specialize in growing in desert heat.

I am just trying to get started with SFG and was wondering about box size. I have been thinking 4 x 8 running east/west is what I want with a trellis on the north side of the box. If the trellis is even with the north side of the box, is it difficult to work on the plants south of the trellis since you would either have to reach ~3.5' from the front or through the trellis in the back? Would it be easier to make the boxes 3 x 8 so that you only have to reach ~ 2.5 feet from the front?

Thanks for your help.

jrmahler......When you've got 8' of length, its hard to reach that 3rd row from the front sometimes. I'd make them 3' wide if they aren't built yet. When you have 4 x 4's you can reach in from any of the other 3 sides which makes it easier to reach but only from one side if they are 8' long.

Good luck and welcome.

quiltbea wrote:jrmahler......When you've got 8' of length, its hard to reach that 3rd row from the front sometimes. I'd make them 3' wide if they aren't built yet. When you have 4 x 4's you can reach in from any of the other 3 sides which makes it easier to reach but only from one side if they are 8' long.

Good luck and welcome.

+1