Raised Garden Beds Part 1

October 12, 2008

Gardening
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.

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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 necessities.

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Garden Tip...

If a new lawn of any extent is to be made, it should first be plowed deep, and if uneven and hilly, grade it to a level surface. The surface should have a heavy dressing of manure, which should be lightly plowed under, and then the surface should be dragged several times until fine, and then rolled with a heavy roller. The seed may now be sown, after which it should be rolled again. The spring is the best time to do this work, although if the fall be dry, it will answer nearly as well to do it at that time. The dryer the ground in preparing it for the seed, and for the sowing of the same, the better.
~ James Sheehan
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Raised garden beds are similar 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.
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Garden Tip...

It is a mistake to crowd too many plants into a basket, if they grow they will soon become root-bound, stunted, and look sickly. If the hanging basket be of the ordinary size, one large and choice plant placed in the centre with a few graceful vines to droop over the edges, will have a better effect when established and growing, than if it were crowded with plants at the time of filling. Hanging baskets being constantly suspended, they are exposed to draughts of air from all sides, and the soil is soon dried out, hence careful watching is necessary in order to prevent the contents from becoming too dry. If the moss appears to be dry, take the basket down and dip it once or twice in a pail of water, this is better than sprinkling from a watering-pot. In filling hanging baskets, or vases of any kind, we invariably cover the surface of the soil with the same green moss used for lining, which, while it adds materially to the pleasing appearance of the whole, at the same time prevents the soil from drying out or becoming baked on the surface.
~ James Sheehan
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