It's amazing how much seemingly hidden work goes into preparing the garden before we ever do any actual planting. While preparing the soil is important and worthy of its own series of blog entires, our urban Denver growing zone asks us to keep our garden beds safe from rodents, hail, and strong afternoon sun in the western sky. In addition, when we're growing on a residential lot, we have to make the most of vertical growing space. After some experimenting over the years, we have found the following aspects of physical garden infrastructure that help us keep our veggies in a growing environment most conducive for an abundant harvest.
Let's start with creating vertical growing space. We've tried a wide variety of trellis structures, and for us, the cattle panel arch widely shared across social media seemed the way to go. However, we actually had trouble sourcing cattle panels without paying a ton of money in shipping or delivery costs. Because we're a city farm with no large truck, I had to find another solution. After trying a few different types of wire, I found that this 10-gauge choice* works great in maintaining a strong support that arches beautifully. I won't go into detail about the installation of these arches, as there is a huge collection across social media (see the link above), but I'll briefly share that t-posts, a t-post hammer, and some strong zip ties are all that's really needed to set up this super simple but highly functional arch structure.
Between weather-related threats and cute, but destructive, city critters, we've learned the hard way over the years that we must protect our growing veggies.
Barriers like this best-priced 7ft x 100ft deer netting* and this cheaper-than-hail-fabric mosquito netting* have helped us keep our veggies safe; however, these netting options do need a structure upon which to be installed. For us we have found that 1/2" PVC pipe in 10ft lengths is just right when arched over a garden bed and anchored by 1/4" threaded rod* that has been tapped into the corners of our raised beds with a rubber mallet.
Video of our beds during a hail storm under the shield of mosquito netting
How I wish I could simply plant my veggie starts, turn on an automated watering system, and no longer worry. The truth is that these infrastructure tips don't take very long at all to install, and the peace of mind that comes from protecting our plants is well worth it, especially if we have spent weeks tending to them from seed. If you'd like any further footage of our garden bed set-up, you can find plenty of videos @firstavefarm on Instagram.
* links with an asterisk indicate a product that First Ave Farm receives an affiliate incentive for purchases made through these links. It's important to note that these are the actual products we use to build our garden bed's physical infrastructure.
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