Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening

 

For Noel Valdes, founder of CobraHead Garden Tools, it’s about helping people grow their own food.

A lifelong vegetable grower, Noel now speaks to gardening groups across the Midwest promoting organic raised bed vegetable gardens.




Noel’s methods have been influenced by the intensive techniques introduced to the United States by Alan Chadwick and popularized by John Jeavons, but over the past thirty years he has developed his own raised bed gardening style.


Noel’s method requires no power tools, uses few external inputs and provides high yields of delicious produce for him and his family. Noel grows in over twenty raised beds producing everything from lettuces and other salad greens, to potatoes, sweet potatoes and other storage crops, to small fruits like raspberries and strawberries. While his garden is relatively large, his methods can be applied by the home gardener who just wants to start with one bed.

Says Noel, “After years of implementing and practicing open raised bed gardening techniques and intensive home grown food production, I'm convinced that one person can easily grow up to a third or more of all the food requirements for a family of four or more in a very small area. They can do this with relatively minimal inputs in both terms of time and money, without the need of power tools, and with organic and extremely sustainable gardening practices.

"People are starting to realize that growing food using good food growing practices is necessary for both healthy people and a healthy planet. If small scale growing techniques similar to the ones I explain were utilized by a large percentage of the world's population, I'm sure issues of hunger would be reduced and the health of the earth and its human population would be greatly improved."