Good afternoon!
Location: Western Washington State (Seattle area)
My wife and I are starting a garden and we are complete beginners to say the least! We’ve read online that filling the base of a raised vegetable garden help provide natural drainage and is a great way to save on soil costs.
We’ve done quite a lot of random maintenance in our backyard… tree trimming, raking and also absolutely destroying (in a good way) the overgrown ivy everywhere.
As we were using some of the scraps to fill up the vegetable bed, I got the thinking about how invasive ivy is and if we should be concerned with getting even a trace in the bottom of the garden bed. I am getting mixed answers when I look online so figured I’d turn to here for help.
We haven’t added any direct ivy leaves, but we no longer can safely guess what in our pile is tree roots, branches or ivy roots… not sure if we should scrap everything in there and find an alternative source to fill this in with… (our neighbor is giving out tons of logs / fire wood for free so maybe that will work?)
Please feel free to share your thoughts or experiences. We are beginners and would love any additional tips, advice or feedback.
Photo 1: first garden bed filled with stuff before tearing up the local ivy
Photo 2: what we’ve started to fill the second garden bed with
Photo 3: picture of what I think is an ivy root?
Photo 4: scrap pile including the stupid ivy on top
by comradepilo
29 Comments
Ivy WILL grow from that. Managing it in n the bed should be easy enough. I say leave it.
Ohhh.. you’re literally asking for it
If it was me I’d get rid of all of that and start over. It won’t be worth it to pull non stop
Remove it.
Just need to plant some bamboo and mint.
The mint will give you a nice ground cover, the bamboo will be a stalk for the ivy to grow on. It’ll be beautiful.
The three sisters nobody asked for.
I have the same style of raised beds, but I haven’t tried to fill them in with anything but soil and compost. No issues with drainage to date, as they’re bottomless. Sure you’ll end up buying an extra bag of soil to get them started, but that means your roots can grow that much deeper.
Save yourself soooo much trouble down the road, get rid of those asap!! just shell out for some pine bark mulch
This is the worst idea since that old lady decided to swallow a horse to catch the cow to catch the goat to catch the dog to catch the cat to catch the spider to catch the fly she swallowed by accident, when all she *should* have done is cough.
All you should do now is get those ivy roots entirely all the way out of there, or else you’ll be in for never-ending problems.
Go with the neighbor’s logs and let the ivy pile dry out for a few months. Suggestion: pack the logs in parallel rather than just throwing them in. This will help you get more wood and need less soil. Good luck!
I think you could probably bury the ivy scraps in the very, very bottom…. Especially if you line the bottom of your bed with cardboard but it seems unnecessarily risky.
Ivy is something that gets burned or binned by me. Small stuff I throw out in the cement in the hot sun first and then I throw it way. My oaks give me plenty of safe material for that sort of thing
https://preview.redd.it/nin2ice1q4kg1.jpeg?width=411&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=27e5379db92e8d133a082b0da75cc0016ec3f230
Babyyyyy no 😭😭
would you drop the link on those metal beds? they look great.
so… you’re re-planting ivy roots? fascinating way to choose destruction.
I would not trust ivy roots, leaves, twigs or any other part of that plant! I put the ivy I pull into those giant paper leaf bags and leave them under my house for a year or so before I haul them to the dump!
Run it through a chipper first and it’s fine.
Otherwise, I’d advise against it.
Did you say ivy Roots?. Might as well just throw in a whole bunch of sticker Bush branches and you’ll be all ready for a fun-filled summer
This is too much and won’t decay on any reasonable timeframe as well. The YouTubers giving this advice are going for views. It’ll also cause your beds to need to be watered WAY more often. Most beds are already well drained and additional drainage means they will dry out like crazy if in a sunny area.
If you can’t afford to fill them you should build shorter beds rather than filling it with junk that the plants cant use for a decade
Oh… *oh no*
No 🔥
The dead wood is fine, it’s a permaculture technique called Hugel culture. But the ivy roots may sprout so get rid of all those, they’ll suffocate everything else. In the first year of a hugel bed spuds will grow well.
OMG, no. Noooooooooooo. No.
Not that I haven’t also had such thoughts! I have stuff I use at the bottom of beds or hügelmounds, stuff I add to the compost pile, and then there’s stuff I don’t even want to put in the green waste bin till it’s *SO DEAD*, because I hate the idea that the city green waste pile will start sprouting bermuda grass and vinca!
oh you dont need to use that many roots. just an inch and by the end of the year you will have enough to fill that entire raised garden
I would never put ivy in my beds hugel or other
Get rid of that now or regret later
Unless you are starting an ivy nursery then I would say you are off to a good start
Hey, well good on you for pulling the ivy AND for pausing to think before going forward with that plan! I commend you!
Burn it
Big nope. Kill it with fire.
Source: I’ve been battling ivy for the last 8 years since I bought my house.
Don’t do it. I did this with fresh crepe myrtle branches that were cut down. Ended up spending all summer digging out the wood because it grew roots kept sending up shoots.
Hm…. I wonder… if you had a barrel to heat up and smoke all those branches to kill the plant cells inside…