Good Gardening with Raised Garden Beds

If you are new to gardening, then you may be wondering whether planting in raised garden beds is worth all the time and effort required to create and maintain the beds.  While there are a lot of gardeners who do not choose to use raised garden beds, there are certain conditions that require making raised garden beds to ensure good gardening.  In this post, we provide a brief overview about raised gardening beds and enumerate some situations in which raised garden beds make your plants grow better.

Raised garden beds are pretty much just garden soil heaped high and held in place by borders made from any available material such as stone, wood, or brick.  While it is up to you how high you would like your raised garden beds to be, keep in mind that the higher a raised garden beds is, the more frequently you will have to water.  Ideally, a raised garden bed should be no more than four feet across, so that you don’t have to bend over too far when tending to your plants.

Raised garden beds are best used in the following gardening scenarios:

1.     Your garden soil is low-quality in terms of nutrients and texture.  If the ground-level soil in your gardening area is not sufficiently rich in nutrients, you will need to amend it by adding compost and other organic matter such as peat.  If your garden covers a large area, it can get pretty costly to maintain good soil quality.  By using raised garden beds, you can simply amend the soil in the beds instead of having to amend the entire garden ground.  This is obviously more efficient and cost-effective.

2.    Your crop needs good soil drainage.  Certain plants, such as roses, tend to develop root fungi and rot when exposed to excessive soil moisture.  These type of plants will benefit from raised bed gardening.  Because of the elevated planting area, water tends to drain faster from a raised bed.  Garden soil that is composed mostly of clay would have better drainage.

3.    You live in an area with short growing periods.  Raised bed gardening can lengthen the gardening season by a few precious weeks.  This is important if you live in an area where frost continues pretty much well into spring.  Because a raised garden bed has exposed (albeit bordered sides) there is more surface area exposed to sunlight, so heat can get into the plant roots easily.

4.    You are planting a crop that thrives in warm weather conditions.  Certain plants such as the bell pepper need lots of sunlight and heat in order to produce robust and sweet-tasting fruit.  As stated before, a raised garden beds traps heat better.