We love our raised beds, and we’re glad we took the time to build and install them last year. But we omitted what we now know was a crucial step.
Not everyone has big problems with voles. If you don’t, be grateful for your blessings. We struggle with voles (think tiny mice that just love to eat the roots of plants) all the time. What we now wish we had done when we built and installed our raised beds was to close them off to field mice from the bottom using hardware cloth. We actually did think to do it on the last four beds we built, but the first 12 are unprotected. Our podcast this week is about our work (with generous help from my brother Tom) to pull all but one of those unprotected beds, scoop up the soil in them, reposition the beds, install hardware cloth in the bottom of each one, and then refill them with soil. It’s a big job, but we’ve reluctantly decided we have no choice if we want to be able to grow vegetables effectively.
Listen – 16:14
Two of the beds we decided to retrofit had crops we wanted to save. Amanda transplanted about 40 strawberry plants from bed #10 to bed #2. Nice roots, huh? Later this week she’ll vacate bed #7 of its precious garlic crop, which she says she’ll transplant “here and there.” You can see a couple of the beds in the background awaiting the re-prep of their “pads.”