“...would love to plant potatoes & pumpkins & stuff that ‘sprawls’. Right now, I do plant a squash or two, but they quickly hog at least half the raised bed they are in.”
We have a lower garden, down near the pasture and fenced off from the heifers and later electrically fenced against those bloody raccoon! We grow Sweet Corn, Popcorn, Potatoes, Winter squashes and Melons down there. Beau tills it up, adds loads and loads of composted manure (thanks to our hay-burning, otherwise USELESS Mule!) and then we use thick sheets of black plastic that he scrounged from some work site to keep down the weeds. The potatoes will be covered in straw once they’re up more.
I’ll post some pix when it’s up and running. Just an empty field right now with a few corn seedlings poking up. ;)
And...Bale Gardening seems to be all the rage, now. Makes sense for people with less space and the yummy mulch/compost it leaves behind is worth the price of admission!
We have a raccoon (aka “Ricky”) who is raiding the garbage cans. I came up with a “Ricky Wrap” that keeps him from getting the tops off. He is going to find the garden, I’m sure. I’ve never had a problem with raccoons & the garden in the past & we definitely have them, but ‘Ricky’ seems to be especially precocious (for lack of a better word). Something very, very bad is going to happen to Ricky if: a. he figures out how to get around the ‘Ricky Wraps’ b. he gets into the garden.
I’m looking forward to the compost from the straw bales. It will stay in the two raised beds where the bales are now. I bought ‘Leaf Gro’ for the other beds - like that stuff a lot. Next year, I shouldn’t have to buy anything - plan on straw baling in the two raised beds I’m not using this year. I’ll either rotate every year or go full straw bale - depends on how this year, maybe next, turns out.