What is Raised Bed Gardening?
If your summer daydreams involve a vibrant garden full of new, organic vegetables and beautiful flowers, there is no better way to make it a reality than with an elevated garden bed.
Elevated beds solve all sorts of problems for gardeners: high-quality planting soil prevents issues such as hard clay or nutrient-poor soil, ensuring you can plant more deeply and produce more. The container provides superior control of pests and weeds compared with the plantation at ground level. The tall beds often mean less stooping and bending to pick weeds or harvest, along with structural support for the rows of the hoops to start growing earlier in spring and then continue into fall.
Making a raised garden bed is a simple project for even a beginner on the weekend. You can find ready-to-assemble kits online, or simply make your own custom-created beds from common supplies of hardware. Here’s how to do it, from plant positioning to potting soil.
Raise Bed Gardening VS. Traditional Gardening
Once you start a group or school garden, the first thought always turns to the design of raised beds. The word “raised bed” refers to an elevated box in the sense of community and school gardens, which is relatively limited in size and filled with enough soil to support plants without using the soil underneath the box.
An elevated bed frame may be made of wood, masonry, or other building material. The elevated beds can differ in size depending on the location, the materials used in the construction, and the preferences of the gardeners. Usually, the elevated beds are 6 to 8 inches high, 3 to 6 feet wide, and 6 to 8 feet long. Some raised bed frames are further elevated with blocks or bricks over the ground to make them more available to people who have difficulty bending or stooping.
There are a huge amount of benefits to gardening in raised beds for community and school gardens, including Manageability: raised beds to provide a sustainable way to intensively garden a smaller area.
Soil compaction prevention and plant damage: One of the greatest benefits of raised beds comes from the protection that the structure offers from foot traffic, particularly from children working in a garden area. Since people are working on the paths and are not walking in well-designed raised beds, the soil is not compacted, and plants are less likely to be harmed.
Longer growing season: In spring, elevated beds warm up faster and drain better (assuming the soil is adequately prepared), allowing for a longer growing season and improved growing conditions. A properly prepared raised bed, especially in the South, allows the plant roots to breathe.
When the soil in a raised bed has stabilized, compaction becomes virtually non-existent, thereby eliminating the need for seasonal tilling. Weed populations are declining over time in a well-cared-for and mulched raised bed.
A well-prepared elevated bed makes better drainage of the soil than in an in-garden. The soil drains so poorly in some areas of Georgia that raised beds to allow for the gardening of crops that would not otherwise grow.
Modifications to the soil easier: A raised bed will allow crop growth in an area that would otherwise not support gardening.
The raised beds can act as a form of terracing on steep slopes. Parking lots and other dense, difficult-to-garden urban soils may be constructed on raised beds. The raised beds can be properly adapted for different crops that grow in particular soils.
Considering the concentration of the gardening room, water, fertilizer, mulch, and soil modifications can be handled more carefully, resulting in less waste. Support for disabled gardeners: raised beds will improve mobility for wheelchairs or for gardeners who have trouble bending over at the proper height.
Raised beds clearly define boundaries in gardens where plots are rented for the year and reduce inadvertent trampling.
Extending directly on the field provides major benefits for both school and community gardens. Gardening in the field requires tractors to be used for the initial planning of fields, and the start-up costs are much smaller than for the beds produced.
Many benefits include the use of existing soil: most soils are perfectly appropriate for planting, given that the soil is tilled, mulched, and watered properly. Many Georgia soils can yield a bountiful harvest even without organic amendments.
Financially economical: Money can be saved and used by using existing soil and not importing soil for organic modifications that would be required to enhance even the imported soil. Since finding true topsoil in Georgia is highly unlikely, it is always easier to boost what you have than to import something new and probably unknown.
Typically purchased topsoil is either man-made (which consists mostly of bark and sand) or equivalent to the already available on-site soil. If properly modified, clay soils have benefits that are not present in man-made soils. If you are unsure of your soil’s consistency or how to change it, take samples for testing to your nearest county extension agent. If there is some possibility that the soil has been polluted with potentially harmful substances, ask to get heavy metals checked on the soil.
You can prepare a flat, well-drained area with a tractor or with a large roto-tiller. It is easy to substitute an in-ground garden with another crop or switch to another site. In-ground beds do not dry out as easily as elevated beds and thus will take less water to hold. Irrigation systems for clear, inground gardens are simple to design and easy to install compared to elevated beds requiring careful design and setup.
While raised beds have many benefits, there are also some drawbacks. Elevated beds involve the building of a retaining wall or bottom. Although this can be constructed with recycled materials, at least initially, it still needs additional work. Elevated raised beds are even more expensive and need some degree of engineering to bear the soil’s weight. Elevated beds must also be lined with soil which can become costly and requires a thorough understanding of soil and soil alteration. Elevated beds are more permanent than in-ground gardens so it is important to prepare for future use. Some crops are not well suited for the growing production of beds.
Sweet corn, for example, needs bigger blocks of plants to ensure proper pollination. Watermelons tend to consume a tiny raised bed when compact varieties are grown and trellised, perhaps. Lastly, for all activities, including planting, fertilizing, and weeding, most raised bed gardens rely entirely on hand labor.
It is important to think before starting a community or school garden about which form of garden is appropriate for your current and future needs and how much time and money your situation would take. For more information on planning, establishing, and maintaining a community or school garden see the other publications in this series.
Benefits of Raised Bed Gardening
By definition, a raised bed is a garden bed that is built up rather than down into a position that solves all manner of gardening challenges. Simply heaping soil up into a mound, or using boxes to enclose and hold garden soil, you may build raised beds. Garden boxes are also synonymous with raised beds, as some retaining wall or material needs to be used almost always to preserve the bed’s integrity over time.
How to create an upscale garden bed Where to buy upscale garden beds and upscale bed components. However, you identify them; upscale garden beds provide benefits for all types of gardeners. Just 10 of the many explanations for using raised beds are out here:
No tilling is better for the soil. A raised bed is just a way to set up the soil for the simplest gardening possible — the kind of ‘no job.’ Instead of tilling the soil year after year to apply fertilizer and improvements, gardeners typically retain their uplifted beds by simply adding materials to the surface. Bush beans grow between seaweed mulch, added for nutrient suppression and weed suppression to the bed top. Compost, mulches, manures, and other soil conditioners all will go straight to the top few inches of the soil without the need for backbreaking work. And, when worms and roots make their way through, the soil is able to do its own tillage. Although daily tilling by human hands tends to deplete the soil structure, doing nothing can build up your soil’s organic component over time.
Your back is going to thank you. It’s amazing how much back and knee strain can happen just by weeding a garden, particularly a big one, and over time this can take a serious toll. A raised bed, especially those at least 12′′ tall can solve chronic back pain and joint pain. Moreover, young people who enjoy farming as a career opportunity should consider the possible harm to the back that can be caused by hand-weeding organic farming. View elevated beds as a healthcare benefit.
Elevated beds can look better, but making better beds can have a practical function. In the city, particularly if you’re trying to get away with a vegetable garden in the front yard, an elevated bed can be a necessity to keep your neighbors happy. Even elevated beds make it a little easier to maintain pathways as there is a clear line between the bed and the road.
Slugs can ascend, but the tall sides of an elevated garden box slow them down and give them the ability to stop them in their tracks. Many gardeners swear that slugs aren’t going to crawl over flashing copper, which can surround your package. Hardware cloth may also be mounted at the bottom of the box to avoid crawling criteria, including groundhogs from stealing root crops. And dogs are less likely to urinate directly on your plants, because of their height. If deer is an issue, you can add deer fencing directly to your house, or buy a box with a deer fence built into it. The addition of plastic hoops to raised garden beds for bird barriers, cold frames, or row coverings is so much simpler.
Rising the soil means improved drainage in areas susceptible to floods, or in marshy yards, the best way to have a full growing season is to have an elevated garden bed. For a raised bed the most common depth is 11′′, which is one inch below the sides of a 12′′ high garden box. This is ample drainage for most crops and gives plants nearly a foot of extra breathing room above wet conditions. Elevated beds usually often tend to drain better, even in heavy rains. How to build elevated beds on sloping, rocky ground 6 Techniques to create soil for your elevated beds and planters By burying weed seeds and allowing them the ideal opportunity to spread, you would have fewer weeds, and crabgrass Tilling simply produces more weeds.
Efficiently raised bed growers swear to destroy all the plants that grew up in winter by covering their beds with mulch, cardboard, or black plastic in the spring. If it’s time to start planting again, just rake the dead weeds off before they have a chance to go seeding. One of the most successful forms of battling crabgrass is via a raised bed. Install a weed barrier at least 10′′ high on the bottom of beds to avoid the grass from infiltrating.
Earlier in the season lettuce, you can plant elevated beds Largely due to improved soil drainage, early planting in elevated beds is possible as the soil dries out earlier in the spring and warms up earlier for planting than soil at ground level. Many gardeners often consider a surprising number of plants in a raised bed that they shouldn’t have been able to overwinter. Again, a lot of that has to do with the kind of soil in the garden. If tilted and compost-fortified, the soil can better control temperatures than disturbed, nutrient-poor soils.
Elevated beds may be temporary Renters who are anxious to have a garden should start the conversation with their landlord by showing them a nice photo of an elevated bed. A compact, clean, and properly designed garden box will improve property values and be a charm rather than an eyesore. If the proprietor still says no, using a removable garden box, a temporary garden can be installed. The box is put simply on the table, the cardboard is put inside over the grass, and the box is filled with dirt. Take the box with you as you pass, spread out the soil, and throw the grass seed back down.
Raised beds without polluted soil Urban gardeners are at higher risk of heavy metals, including lead, being swallowed. Many different vegetables, particularly roots, tomatoes, and greens, accumulate heavy metals from polluted soils and can be a real danger. Positioning beds away from the road, examining past uses of your property, and planting dense hedges can all help, but raised beds offer a great opportunity to put in fresh soil that is not subject to any contamination on site. In addition, toxicity is significantly minimized by adding compost, diluting annual waste concentrations, and attaching heavy metals to soil particles (just another amazing application for compost!).
Elevated beds are ideal for beginners. Elevated beds offer a convenient way for beginners to start gardening by removing many barriers. We take a little more money upfront but guarantee success in the first year in several respects. Add a shell, some soil, some compost, some seeds, and some water, and it will grow everything. “Row crows” can’t say the same success: till, fertilize, till again, seed, plant, plant a little bit more than the cycle isn’t as straightforward as the direction the bed raised provides.
