Post by raphanus on Mar 19, 2023 9:20:26 GMT -5
I have a large raised bed in the front yard that I built exactly one year ago, and last summer it was a monoculture of zinnias and this past winter it was diakons.
The bed is cinderblocks and is 20 feet long and 3.5 ft wide, and is 18 inches deep. That’s a lot of soil volume.
The problem is that this bed is perpendicular to the house and exactly parallel with the property line to the hostile nieghbor, about 3 feet in from the property line. This bed gets lots of sun early in the morning, but by mid-day, the sun is blocked by the house, and by late afternoon, it is all shade.
The zinnias did fantastic last summer, but I don’t need 60 square feet of flowers. It was expensive to build this bed, took like 75 cinderblocks and multiple truckloads of compost, so given that level of financial investment, I want it to produce food, not just flowers.
I considered doing corn because that gets tall and would make a nice fence so the neighbor would have a harder time harassing me, but I’m not sure it gets enough sun for corn, and it’s a long bed (20 x 3.5) and corn does best in square blocks for pollination.
I considered okra, but okra needs picking almost daily, and 60 square feet of okra would be insane, I could never eat all that.
Right now I’m leaning towards Roselle. It gets tall, doesn’t need much care, and I wouldn’t have to be out there to harvest it until close to Thanksgiving, it would make a nice privacy fence, and I could just harvest it all hopefully in one night. Roselle doesn’t provide much calories though. Maybe I should do a mixed planting of something that gets tall and makes a good privacy fence, but also plant a few plants that make calories, like some winter squash or watermelon mixed in with the corn or Roselle. Tough decisions.
The bed is cinderblocks and is 20 feet long and 3.5 ft wide, and is 18 inches deep. That’s a lot of soil volume.
The problem is that this bed is perpendicular to the house and exactly parallel with the property line to the hostile nieghbor, about 3 feet in from the property line. This bed gets lots of sun early in the morning, but by mid-day, the sun is blocked by the house, and by late afternoon, it is all shade.
The zinnias did fantastic last summer, but I don’t need 60 square feet of flowers. It was expensive to build this bed, took like 75 cinderblocks and multiple truckloads of compost, so given that level of financial investment, I want it to produce food, not just flowers.
I considered doing corn because that gets tall and would make a nice fence so the neighbor would have a harder time harassing me, but I’m not sure it gets enough sun for corn, and it’s a long bed (20 x 3.5) and corn does best in square blocks for pollination.
I considered okra, but okra needs picking almost daily, and 60 square feet of okra would be insane, I could never eat all that.
Right now I’m leaning towards Roselle. It gets tall, doesn’t need much care, and I wouldn’t have to be out there to harvest it until close to Thanksgiving, it would make a nice privacy fence, and I could just harvest it all hopefully in one night. Roselle doesn’t provide much calories though. Maybe I should do a mixed planting of something that gets tall and makes a good privacy fence, but also plant a few plants that make calories, like some winter squash or watermelon mixed in with the corn or Roselle. Tough decisions.
