Q: On your TV show about tools for older gardeners your Mom was shown using a bathtub for a raised bed. What kind of soil did she have in the bathtubs?

A: I went straight to the source and asked.

My mother asserts that her key component was goat manure collected from the barn of our neighbors Webb and Adine Mask. She remembers putting a few inches of gravel in the bottom of the tub, followed by a foot of “good dirt”. On top went several inches of the aforementioned magic ingredient. She mixed the manure with the dirt using a small shovel.

She’s quite successfully grown bush beans, broccoli, strawberries, turnip greens, tomatoes and eggplant in her tubs!