Raised Bed Gardening!

A popular vegetable garden layout which many home gardeners choose is the raised garden bed. Raised beds are versatile, easy to use, and have many advantages over traditional gardening. For example, a raised bed allows you to easily control your soil mixtures so that you always have the proper soil for your plants. As you can customize the soil mixtures in your raised beds, you can greatly improve soil drainage for your plants. Many gardeners build raised beds just for this reason. Raising your garden bed even eight inches above the existing ground level can greatly improve drainage. I would suggest 12 inches however.

While one of the most obvious benefits to gardening with raised beds is their adjustable height, raised beds also have numerous other benefits. For example, because raised beds are designed so that you don’t have to actually step into your raised beds for maintenance, you can produce larger quantities of fruits in vegetables in the same amount space that you’d use in a traditional garden plot.

Garden maintenance is also easy with raised beds. You can quickly and easily remove weeds and control pests in your raised beds. If you use black plastic mulch for weed control, you will use significantly less plastic for your raised beds that in a traditional garden. Moreover, rodents and other pests that like to eat your veggies in a regular garden bed will have difficulty reaching plants in raised beds. Crop rotation is also relatively painless in raised beds, which can help prevent problems with diseases that can form in the soil over time.

Watering is also easy and more efficient, as you irrigate only where plants are growing and not the walking spaces between your garden rows. Additionally, you can grow your plants closer together, which helps to shade the soil and reduces evaporation. A drip irrigation system is ideal and efficient.

You can also quickly change soil and plants in your raised beds. For example, using a raised bed makes it very easy to plant annuals in the summer and replace them with bulbs later in the growing season. If you grow vegetables or fruits, raised beds can greatly increase the growing season. Soil actually heats up quicker in raised beds and the addition of a removable plastic frame transforms your raised bed into an instant cold frame.

Raised beds can also make gardening more creative, as you can use many different kinds of materials to build you beds including beautiful hardwoods, bricks, stones, and recycled materials such as railroad ties.

Vegetables are normally planted closer together than in the row vegetable garden layout making this is an ideal choice if you only have space for a small vegetable garden. These beds need to be narrow enough so that you do not need to tread on your beds to plant, weed or harvest your veggies. A good width would be 3 to 4 feet, (.9 - 1.2 metres) if you can get at the bed from both sides. You can build raised beds out of recycled wood, bricks, concrete blocks, stones or just pile up the soil on top of the ground. A good depth would be about 8-12 inches (20-30 cm).

A raised bed will enable the soil to warm quicker so you can plant earlier in the season. It will also improve drainage. Even if you have very poor soil or even a concrete slab (make sure you have a soil depth of 12 inches or 30cm for this situation), a raised bed will allow you transform a barren patch into a bountiful harvest. A raised bed also alleviates the problem of tree roots competing with your veggies for nutrients and water but make sure that any tree will not cast too much shade on the garden beds.