those hanging tomato plants in the bag with holes in it, are pretty nice, you just hang them in the porch, water them occasionally, and they grow tomatoes. I love cherry tomatos, and I had alot of them form just one of those plants.
If you don't mind my asking, what is the reason for the raised bed garden, rather than simply tilling your topsoil 10" deep?
We have a compost barrel, basicly a barrel with holes punched i it and the bottom and top gone, and you thourw your compost in there, and when it gets about half full, you move it around, then that spring, you take the rotottiller, or hoe and shovel if you like manual labor, and turn it all over into your garden. I am lazy, so I just move the compost barrel around on the spot where the garden goes. I also have plenty of horse and cattle manure I can work with, some of it at my dad's place has tunred into that nice black stuff you buy at the store for a fortune..
I could get a few wheel barrows full of it.
My biggest problem with gardening, is weeding. I absolutely hate weeding.
I hear there's actually people who will buy stinging nettle, speaking of weeds. Is this true? I have a huge "crop" of those every year.
I though about augmenting my wood heater with coal when I was using an outside wood boiler. I kept comming home to a cold house, because the wood woudln't last 12 hours that I was gone on a really cold day. Then it would take a couple of days to get up and ahead of the cold. So I installed a propane boiler I found for $50 and ended up selling the wood boiler.
$2000 was hard to turn down, when I needed the money, and didn't see myself using it anytime soon. Now I think I could use it for the greenhouse type of stuff.