No More Raised Beds

I decided to get rid of most of my raised beds.  All the manuals I read said to use them, but I'm starting to reconsider that.  I don't think they make sense in Texas, where the heat gets so brutal, and the soil just dries out more quickly in raised beds.  Which then requires lots of water, which we lack especially in these times of drought.  It would make more sense to grow directly in the ground, but the soil is hard black clay. Which is why people recommend raised beds in the first place.

So what is the solution?  That is where Back to Eden comes in, which I'll write more about some other time. But the main idea is to put wood chips on top of the soil, which somehow changes the texture beneath the chips into loose, arable soil.  (For one thing, it keeps the soil moist and cool, and for another, as I am told, microbes eat the wood, so the soil comes to life.)

So my backyard is starting to look more and more like this. (I bought a small wood chipper to chip branches, plants, etc. on property, but most of the chips come from local tree service companies that let people come and get it for free.)

Notice that much of the area is shaded.  That's the case on this south side of the property from late October to early March, but the sun hits it fully for the main growing part of the year.

But even though I am moving in the direction of wood chips and planting directly in the soil, I am keeping a few raised beds for root vegetables. This past week I decided to build one next to my driveway.  It will be outside of my fence, but I've noticed that critters leave it alone, so long as I am growing potatoes (the part of the plant that is above ground is poisonous).

I took one of the beds from the backyard and set it out by the driveway, patching it up where the wood had worn away.  This is what it looked like at first (some of the area had been used for growing before, some was just grass).

Then, after some scratching and digging, and carting away the clay soil to a temporary location, it looked like this:

But then I decided to go down deeper, because I wanted to have some room to put lots of mulch on top.  As you will see, I uncovered a wire of some sort, which I just left there in case it did something.

I then proceeded to start filling it up with a combination of the removed clay mixed together with horse manure/wood shavings I get for free from a local stable.  The texture of the soil becomes just right for root vegetables, and I'll show an example of that from the backyard:

(Actually, this is not exactly right.  The bed in which I grew the carrots had soil from a variety of sources around the yard, including black clay, mixed with the manure/shavings.  It is not exactly the same as the soil next to the driveway  ... black clay mixed with broken up white rocks ... that I am mixing together with the manure/shavings.)

Once I finish filling up the bed with this mixture and covering it with wood chips, it will be ready for planting potatoes in late January.