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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	Cedar Creek 3636 Raised Container Gardens

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...

Three things are absolutely essential in the sowing of seeds, in order to have that success which we all desire to attain:

First; care should be taken to obtain fresh, pure seeds, without which all our after work with them will be in vain.

Second; the soil in which to sow them should be a fine, mellow loam, free from stones and other coarse materials.

Thirdly; sowing the seed. The general custom is to sow in drills. The depth at which seeds should be sown must of course be regulated according to their fineness, or coarseness.
~ 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 try to stimulate into growth, by the use of fertilizers, those plants which give every indication of being sickly or stunted; they will make such a plant sicker, if they do not kill it outright. If guano is used in potting soil, it should be in the proportion of one pound to every bushel of soil.
~ James Sheehan
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