Turn your Raised Beds Upside Down

Turn your Raised Beds Upside Down.  When I give public talks in the Verde Valley and Sedona, I often employ a watering can, a muffin tin, and a measuring cup, among other demonstration tools.  What happens when you "plant" on the mounds of an inverted muffin tin?  Water runs off instantly, taking fertility and organic matter right along with it.  

Raised beds are a technology created in and for wetter, cooler climates, in order to drain water and to warm the soil.  Add this technology to a hot, dry climate, and what do you get?  Lots of maintenance or the alternative, stressed out plants and would-be gardeners who give up.  Sidebar: Raised beds can be an "appropriate technology" here in certain circumstances, in cases of accessibility for physical limitations and in super rocky terrain, but raised beds are not an "appropriate technology" across the board for our region.  If you already have or build your own raised beds, be sure to extend the border several inches higher than the growing surface, so that you at least catch the rain that lands on the beds themselves.  

Imagine an alternative!  We can learn a ton about gardening from the practices of Native Americans who successfully grew food throughout our region for millenia, often with techniques that required very little maintenance and work.  Dryland growers trained their crops to be drought tolerant by planting in receptive planting beds that collected rain from nearby areas.  These receptive planting beds also naturally collected the nutrients and the organic matter that make plants thrive.  

We can replicate the same patterns in our own gardens and farms with creativity, time, shovels, earth-moving equipment, work parties, and patience.  I have employed this style of gardening at the Food Forest at Crescent Moon Ranch and result is plants that rarely need irrigation.  Turn that muffin tin rightside up and create naturally abundant gardens that need less water and maintenance!