Keyhole Garden?

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Bootstrap
Posts: 14398
Joined: Thu Oct 20, 2016 9:59 am
Affiliation: Mennonite

Keyhole Garden?

Post by Bootstrap »

I haven't had a garden for way too many years, but we have plenty of room for one and we live in the three-season South. I do need to get the garden out of the way of rabbits (and occasional deer, but I think they are less of a problem). Also, the best soil we have is in a shady area of the back, but I probably want to plant in a sunny area, so moving some dirt and compost and adding some manure makes more sense than trying to plant at ground level where it's too shady.

I've been thinking of a raised bed garden that is high enough to deter the bunnies, and I like the idea of a keyhole garden because we seem to go through a lot of compost. Does anyone have experience with keyhole gardens? What are the tradeoffs compared to square foot gardening or other kinds of raised-bed gardening?
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Neto
Posts: 4550
Joined: Wed Oct 19, 2016 5:43 pm
Location: Holmes County, Ohio
Affiliation: Gospel Haven

Re: Keyhole Garden?

Post by Neto »

I had to look this up, because I've never heard the term before. I keep a compost pile, and I have reservations about the design I saw described for this, because it sounds like it would be really difficult to turn the compost. Maybe it depends on what all you put in it. Things like grass clippings & leaves require more turning than vegetable food scraps. (Actually, we have two compost piles - one where kitchen scraps are thrown, and another where I do leaves & grass clippings. The kitchen scraps will break down petty much on their own, over time, but leaves have to be shredded, or they just form an impermeable mat - even a soaking rain will not soak through it. I always keep some compost from the year before, and do layers of compost-"soil", grass clippings, & leaves. The soil allows the earth worms to survive right into the midst of the pile, and also keeps the whole pile damper. )

My wife is now doing totally just box gardening (except for the blueberries & raspberries), using vermiculite, 'bull country' compost, and peat to start - no soil at all. But that requires a lot of watering, even here in Holmes County Ohio, which is really wet compared to where I grew up in Oklahoma. My mom is now also doing some box gardening (back home in Oklahoma), because at 87 it is difficult for her to work on ground level in a traditional garden. She has to water constantly. Oh, the strawberries that climb out of the box where we planted them do better than those in the box, so perhaps they need something not included in the 'soil mix recipe' she is using. (The boxes are in the place where we gardened conventionally until a few years ago, so that soil has been built up as well.)
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Congregation: Gospel Haven Mennonite Fellowship, Benton, Ohio (Holmes Co.) a split from Beachy-Amish Mennonite.
Personal heritage & general theological viewpoint: conservative Mennonite Brethren.
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