Raised Garden Beds (2 parts)

By gardener | Apr 21, 2009

Planting your vegetable garden in a raised garden bed makes maintenance, weeding and care much easier to do. If you created your raised beds high enough, you’ll even be able to reduce or eliminate the back pain and soreness that often comes with bending over your garden beds and plants.

Raised garden beds can be almost any height of course. The easiest to create are just a foot or two high, but the most convenient tend to be at least waist high instead. When using raised garden beds for vegetable gardens, it’s also best to make sure your beds are not too large. Creating a vegetable garden bed which is about three to four feet wide will make it easier for you to reach the middle plants in your bed, even after everything has started growing large.

When you created raised vegetable garden beds, you can plant just one small bed with multiple vegetables, or you can create multiple beds, each with one or two vegetables apiece. If you decide to create multiple beds though, be sure to leave several feet of space in between them, so that you’re able to easily move around with various garden tools and supplies.

Planting multiple raised garden beds is sometimes referred to as square foot gardening too, because you’re planting small areas for each bed, and you’re leaving room between them for walking, tools, and other neccessities.

Raised garden beds are simimlar to container gardens, because the raised bed serves as a very large container of sorts. They’re popular though, because they make gardening easier. When you create raised garden beds you of course eliminate a lot of the bending over needs as we’ve already mentioned. But you also don’t have to worry about how rocky, hard, or “bad” your regular ground soil is.

Instead of spending days turning over a spot in your yard to create a new garden bed, removing all the large rocks and weeds, and trying to improve the quality by mixing in compost, you can get a nice fertile bed going rather quickly by creating a raised bed, because you simply add fresh materials on top of the ground instead of having to mix it in.

If your raised garden bed will go in a space which has a lot of weeds, you can help prevent these from taking over the bed by laying down a cover sheet of some kind before creating the bed. A thick layer of newspaper works well, as does heavy black plastic. These items will help create a barrier between the existing weeds and your new garden bed soil, so the weeds won’t be able to start sprouting their way to the surface of your new bed easily.

——— PART 2:

Once you have a weed barrier in place, then you simply need to build your garden bed structure. You can use any number of materials to create this structure, because essentially you’re creating a retaining wall for your new garden.

Bricks are a popular choice, as is stone, hard molded plastics, and wood. Which ever material you choose to use, you’ll put it together into a frame like assembly. Your frame can be square, round, rectangular, or fluid. In fact, the shape you choose to create for your garden bed is only limited by your imagination and the space you’ve chosen to create it.

Once you have the garden bed frame created, you’ll then need to start filling it. Depending on the area you’ve placed the bed, you might want to lay an inch or two of rock or pebble at the bottom to help encourage proper drainage of the bed during wet seasons. This is particularly important if you’d laid down a heavy sheet of plastic for your weed barrier, because the ground beneath may not be an available drainage option for quite some time, since the plastic will act as a seal.

Newspaper, straw, wood chips, and other organic materials will allow water to seep through to the underlying soil, so there will be drainage for your garden bed naturally and over time those materials will decompose on their own.

The next step is to add your garden bed soil or compost. If you have enough, filling the bed full with compost is the best option, because it will provide the most fertile growing conditions for your new garden bed plantings.

If you don’t have enough compost to fill the entire bed, then add a good quality soil first. You can either fill the bed about three quarters full with that soil and then add the compost to the top, or mix your soil and compost together. You might also want to add in some water retaining granules, or use soil which has these already included. Since raised garden beds stay above ground year round, like containers they’re prone to dry out a little faster than in ground plantings are. So by adding some water retaining granules, you’ll help ensure the bed won’t dry out too much too quickly.

Once you’ve filled your new garden bed with soil and compost, it’s now time to put the actual plants into place. How you choose to plant them is entirely up to you. You can create rows, individual mounds, or just scatter the plantings randomly through the bed. Be sure you leave enough room for their growth and maturity though. If you’re planting seeds, there will be spacing instructions on the seed package. If you’re planting small seedlings and starter plants that you’ve purchased at the store, those will also have spacing instructions on them. If you’re not sure, then shoot for a minimum of six inch spacing, or just spread the fingers of your hand wide and make sure the new plants are at least that far apart. If they end up being too crowded once they’ve started maturing, you can always thin them out by removing some.

After putting the plants into your new bed, you should cover the top with a good layer of mulch. You can use straw, grass clippings, leaves, wood chips, or synthetic materials just like you would for in ground plantings. Just be sure that all exposed soil is covered well, and that your new plant’s root areas are also covered well.

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