BUG Gardeners: Michael & Rainey and Michael & Jules

You don’t have to be named Michael or have a partner named Michael to engineer a cover for your raised bed garden. After visiting the Bend Urban Gardens Demonstration Garden and checking out our prototypes, these gardeners were inspired to create covers of their own to fit their unique spaces.

Michael and Rainey were determined to convert their side yard in Northwest Bend into a vegetable garden. With guidance from BUG, they successfully constructed and filled two beautiful 24” deep restoration juniper raised garden beds on their own. Knowing they would need to protect their crops from their yard’s abundance of squirrel, chipmunk and bird visitors, but also wanting the ability to easily access their crops, they developed a modular structure to top their garden beds.

To do this, they embedded magnets into the rims of their beds and washers into each modular piece, allowing for the lightweight panels to be removed as needed. Ummm…we may be creating our own version of this functional and tidy design! For shallower beds, this could be a great solution to the challenge of keeping curious dogs (and cats) out of raised garden beds as well.

Once taller tomatoes and peppers are planted and begin to grow vertically in the beds, the top panels can be removed and tomato cages can be inserted as trellis and covered with row cover for pest and frost protection.

As Michael and Jules anticipated their third season growing veggies in their 12’ long raised garden beds in their midtown Bend backyard, they sought out Bend Urban Gardens for help in achieving more success. After an on-site consultation, some seed starting and crop planning lessons, and a tour of the BUG demonstration garden, they improved their irrigation, season extension, and seed starting techniques. With the help of their new season extension tools, they’ve even boldly pushed the boundaries by planting out cold sensitive plants earlier than is typically recommended! Don’t worry - they have lots of tomato back ups under their grow lights just in case their row cover and mini hoophouse double covers aren’t enough for their tender seedlings!

Since a 12’ section of weighted greenhouse plastic was a little too massive to lift up and down without additional assistance, they split their covers in half, which resulted in a small gap between the sections. So, they installed a zipper to link the two sections together! While some ventilation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the plastic will be most effective at retaining heat when gaps are minimized. So smart!

Our mission is to empower aspiring vegetable gardeners, but honestly, the gardeners we grow with continue to renew our own enthusiasm for finding solutions to the unique challenges of growing food in Central Oregon.