Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Elizabeth B." <spacecitydx@webtv.net>]

30-inch raised beds is a personal pet peeve of mine. Liz, this facility you drove past, are they only planning on growing iceberg lettuce and strawberries?

I want to preface my explanation by asking you all to look at your dining room tables or even kitchen sink counters for the moment. Dining room tables are 30 inches tall while kitchen counters are 36 inches. Take a chair and sit in front of your kitchen sink or pullout a chair and sit at your table. Tell me how, if you're in a wheelchair or needing to sit while gardening and have a limited reach.... how does one garden from this height?

Now add in the mature height of the plants in this 30 inch of higher raised bed. How are they ever going to harvest the bed?

I am wheelchair bound and teach the disabled and senior citizen, voluntarily, to consider the plants' mature height when making raised beds. I further illustrate this point with a demonstration of growing plants that have a mature height of say 2 ft such as bush beans, peppers and corn, when it grows in excess heights of 6 feet, how do you harvest? You can't. Not from a sit down position nor from a wheelchair. 

You have got to consider your mature plant heights with your raised bed heights; something the able bodied community never considers.

Also, a 30 inch raised bed is actually a table top garden and it's so that a wheelchair can scoot under the "bed" and it's for low growing plants.

Elizabeth
Founder: Able Farm and Ranch and our website is coming soon.


Liz wrote.............
A town that I drive through regularly on my inspection trips has a large assisted living home right on the highway, and as I passed it yesterday, I saw that they had constructed two very large and high raised beds, probably 30" or so high. Nothing growing in them yet, but I was happy to see them and I'll bet the residents of the complex are even happier.