An Introduction to Raised Bed Gardening
Jenny and I have been enjoying raised bed gardening for many reasons but many don’t know what raised bed are so let’s go through an introduction to raised bed gardening.
Raised bed gardening is a method of growing plants above ground level. This can be done for many reason but for me it sure helps my back feel less pain when working my gardens and I don’t see it getting any less painful the older I get.
Our raised bed gardens are mostly wooden frames although we have been looking at a few that are plastic but look like wood. It would be nice to never have to rebuild them like we just had to do with two of our raised beds. Those wooden beds we here long before we bought our home and did last for many years.
We are thinking about building a raised bed flower garden with rock instead of wood. I have seen a few on my walks around Moncton and some of them look so beautiful. I can tell that these can be challenging as the weight and pressure from the soil can push them out of shape which looks terrible. The point is there are a lot of options for raised bed gardening today.
Raised Bed Gardening Means No Diging In Clay
Raised bed gardening has saved my back more than just when I bend over or crouch down. I can also avoid digging in our yard which is harder than concrete to dig in, the clay is so dense.
Build A Frame And Fill It With Healthy Soil
How hard is it to build raised beds for your gardens? Not very difficult at all. We just build a frame, protect the inside with a layer of plastic to cover the frame. This helps wooden frames last years longer like the ones we are planning to replace. Our neighbours tell us they were there many years before we purchased it.
A Few Benefits To Raised Bed Gardening
Benefit One: I already mentioned how it saves me digging or mining into the earth in our backyard due to the dense clay. The digging is just the first step as we then had to amend the soil so much just to get it to grow more than weeds.
Benefit Two: I like this benefit a whole bunch. I get so much more produce from my raised bed vegetable gardens. We grow so much produce that we can share with friends and neighbours, although in 2012 we won’t be doing so much sharing as we are learning how to can our vegetable garden for winter use, just like when I was kid growing up on the farm.
How can raised bed gardens double or triple your harvest in less space? By square foot gardening. With raised bed gardening I don’t have to walk through my gardens. Each one is about two feet across so can easily reach everything without leaving empty spaces to walk through.
Benefit Three: Amending the soil in your raised bed garden is a breeze. Now we have raised bed gardens in areas of our yard that aren’t too hospitable at all. No digging in the ground. We just fill the raised bed with top soil we purchase locally and it’s ready to go.
Benefit Four: Weeding is no longer a pain either. I can still remember all the weeding I had to do as a kid. We lived on a farm and were pretty much self sufficient but it wasn’t square foot gardening back then. Dad would leave rows big enough for the tractor wheels to move through.
That meant a lot of crawling around on my knees weeding. I did however enjoy the results of my weeding and certainly ate my share of everything, and more.
We don’t have our patio built yet but when we do it will have a few raised bed flower gardens. For these we will of course need to put bottoms in our raised beds, but everything else is the same as those we put directly on the lawn.
Square Foot Gardening
SFG was popularized by Mel Bartholomew and goes perfectly with raised bed gardening. is the perfect way to save money today by having your own raised bed gardens and enjoying square foot gardening while doing it in less than half the space normally required.
Rather than just planting your raised beds in rows like we commonly see it’s divided into sections each about a square foot in size. Depending of course what it is you plan to grow you could be putting multiple plants in each grid section or perhaps just one bigger plant.
When using raised bed gardening along with square foot gardening it’s so easy to lay things out for best planting without wasting an inch of space. It takes less watering and produces less weeds as well. The weeds it does produce are easily removed as the soil in your raised bed should be quality top soil and not hard dense clay like what’s under our raised bed gardens.
Tagged with: Raised bed gardening
Filed under: gardening • home gardening • home gardening tips
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I love the raised bed option. I never thought much of it until we tried it and now it’s hard to go back. Even in the garden plot, we created raised rows and covered everything with grass clippings. Great info on how to create your own!