Raised Garden Beds

I know it doesn’t seem like the time to think of gardening stuff. After all, we just put the garden to bed for the winter and there’s 6” of snow on everything. But if you want a good garden next year, winter is a good time to plan and build your raised beds.

Why raised beds? Why not just dig up a space in your yard and make it your garden? Well….

 

v  You can plant the vegetable closer together than in a row garden. This way, the leaves overlap which conserves moisture and suppresses weeds.

v  It extends your planting and growing season because you can cover the beds with plastic or sheets in case of a light frost.

v  You can create a better growth medium than your native soil.

v  They reduce the amount of water you will use because of drip irrigation, plant density, and fewer weeds.

v  You don’t walk on the raised beds so the soil doesn’t get compacted and the roots can grow easier. Think really big carrots.

v  You get much higher yields from a smaller space than with row gardening.

v  They’re pretty – many gardeners are using raised beds for edible landscaping including yours truly.

v  You don’t have to bend over or kneel as much as row gardening. You can build the beds as high as you need for ease of access.

v  You can use them to control erosion if you build along contour lines on slopes.

v  You can move them, with some work, depending on the changing needs of your garden.

v  Plants can grow up with a trellis like peas, down with root vegetables like carrots, and on the surface like lettuce, all in the same bed.

What’s a raised bed? It’s just a box, built no more than 4 feet wide, which can be any length or shape. You can make them out of wood (untreated), rock, concrete or decorative border material. They can be built as high as it’s convenient but you want them at least 12” deep. You can even raise them off the ground and have sort of a floating garden waist high so there’s no bending at all. Or you can build some window boxes.

We built ours out of untreated red cedar. Walt stained the outside (not on the inside) of the beds in front since they are decorative too. But the ones in back – the main garden – were left plain. You don’t want them more than 4 ft. wide if you can walk on both sides of the bed. That way, you don’t have to reach more than 2 ft. across. If you can only access one side, only build them no more than 2 ½ feet wide, again so you can reach all the way across.

 

Building them is simple. Walt cut the boards to the length we needed – 12 ft. long x 4 feet wide in our main garden beds. There’s nothing fancy about them – they’re just butt-jointed and wood-screwed together and reinforced with L-shaped brackets – three of them in each corner. Then we just had a big wooden box without a top or bottom. Once the boxes are in place, he sunk four 18” pieces of 1 ½” PVC pipe along the long sides and anchored them to the sides of the box with some half-circle brackets. Those hold the trellises. He built five beds for the main garden and three for the front landscaping beds. The front beds don’t have the trellis brackets because we use pretty wrought iron trellises for those.

 

For the other beds, the trellises are also very simple. They’re simply a frame made from 1” PVC pipe. The size of the trellis is dictated by the size of your beds and the height of what you plant. Ours are 12’ long and 6’ tall, with another 18” added to the legs of the trellis to go into the support pipes. They have construction wire (they kind they use in concrete) attached to them with heavy-duty cable ties.

Notice that there is straw between the beds - it keeps the weeds down

Next, you put your box exactly where you want it. Does it have access to water? Is it protected from the wind? Does it have lots and lots of sunshine? We’ve found that the trellises need to go on the north side of the bed, so that the plants get all the south sun. The lengths of our beds run east to west with the trellises on the north to make the most of sunlight.

This faces south

Now you’ve got to fill this bed. You need compost (we’ll talk about that in another blog), peat moss, and some soil – not much. Some people like to add vermiculite. We don’t; vermiculite is nasty stuff, especially for the people who have to mine it. We put a bit of our yard soil in the bottom – enough to cover any weeds or grass that may be under the raised bed. Then we add equal parts of compost and peat moss. Put in enough to at least be level with the top of the bed. It will settle and you want lots of depth for those little veggie roots. Don’t get dirt in the trellis supports.

Turn this over with a shovel, or till with a tiller. We use a Mantis and it does a fabulous job. Make sure all the peat moss is broken up and well tilled.

Now rake it all smooth. Isn’t that pretty? If you’ve built your trellis, put it in the holes.

If you are using drip irrigation (and I really recommend that you do) you can now put your drip irrigation system in place. This way you’ll know where to plant the seeds so they get watered. Each line needs to be about 12” apart and as long as your garden. At one end, we put a valve so we can turn that line on or off as needed. For example, when we pull all the onions or potatoes, we no longer need to water those beds, so we can turn the valve off and conserve water. You are ready to plant!

Right now you’re saying, “Yikes!” or something like that. “All this will cost a lot of money!” Yes, the first year or two is expensive. But after you get things established, the food you get from your garden will more than compensate. Now that we have things set up, I probably spend about $50 on seeds, maybe another $50 on water for the summer, and maybe another $50 on incidentals – a new hand trowel, whatever. We easily make that up whenever I go to the garden and harvest. Plus, the vegetables are fresh, we know where they came from, and we have so many more varieties than the store. Ya gotta eat, right? So you might as well eat something you grew yourself instead of spending your money at the store.

I guess I’d spend my money on the raised bed, then the planting medium – the compost and peat moss – then the irrigation system. You can always hand water if you have to for one year.

We’ll talk later about how to design your garden, but you are now ready to plant a wonderful garden.