Tomato Garden Bed Strategy

The most successful tomato garden bed that we have come up with, through years of experimentation and error, has the following features:

1. Raised

2. Lined with chicken wire

3. Equipped with a frame on which to attach plastic covering (visqueen) that can be raised or lowered over the bed depending on the weather.

In this way, we are now able to grow lots of tomato sauce that is sometimes ripe before the first frost, but has added protection in case they need a little more time.

Building A Raised Tomato Garden Bed

A raised bed is an area of soil that is raised up higher than the surrounding soil. The main advantage to a raised bed is that the soil inside tends to be several degrees warmer than soil that is not raised. This can be accomplished by just piling up soil in an area or by building walls to contain the soil. The walls can be constructed out of just about anything, but the usual materials are either wood planks or stone bricks.

We prefer walls for our tomato garden bed because:

1. The garden looks neater

2. Less foot traffic that compacts the soil

3. Easier to keep slugs out.

About 4 years ago, we built our current tomato/vegetable garden and all the beds were 12 inches deep. This year, we modified the tomato beds to raise them up to 18 inches in order to keep more of the roots warm.

Each bed base is lined with 1/2" diameter chicken wire. The purpose of the chicken wire is to keep our little friends, the moles, out of the beds. The trouble with moles is that their digging leaves large open holes and tunnels throughout the bed causing the roots to just hang there without any soil contact. This also makes irrigation difficult since all the water goes down the holes rather than getting absorbed into the surrounding soil. Plus, voles like to travel in mole tunnels and may come along and munch on the plant roots.

To install the chicken wire:

1. Dig down about two feet, removing all the soil in the bed frame leaving a rectangle-shaped hole. Place soil to the side or in a wheelbarrow.

2. Line the bottom and sides of the hole with the chicken wire, bending it to fit

3. Put all the soil back into the hole, adding more if necessary to fill to the top of the raised bed frame.



Here are photos of our friends' new garden beds built from concrete blocks and applying mortar to the sides to make it look like one continuous wall.

Hoop Frame for Plastic Covering

We started covering our tomato garden bed with plastic (visqueen) at the end of the growing season to help the tomatoes stay warm and ripen faster. However, more recently we discovered that we can use the plastic covering to protect the plants throughout the growing season. The advantages to this are:

1. It keeps them warm during our occasional temperature drops during the summer and avoid blight. Blight typically happens when the temperature drops so significantly and unexpectedly overnight that the plants cannot recover and parts of them start to die. Sometimes a plant can be saved by pruning off the blighted part if it’s a small part of the plant.

2. It keeps the plant foliage from getting rained on. Wet foliage on tomato plants can cause mold spores and other bad things to stick to the leaves and infect the plants. Our plastic covering can be opened at the sides for airflow but the top is closed, forming an umbrella over the bed (see top photo).

We use 1-inch diameter PVC electrical conduit to create a tent over the beds. This conduit is very flexible and will easily bed in an arch over the beds.

A piece of rebar pounded into the ground (with 12 inches left above ground) works well to stick the ends of the conduit over.

You can also screw the pipe into the sides of the bed. But a word of warning – if you do not screw it in tight the pipe will pop off and hit you in the head – painful and hard to explain how you got the black eye from your garden.

Here are photos of a neighbor's garden. Their vegetable garden is a long, skinny area over which they created a hoop structure to hold the plastic covering.