Getting started gardening with raised beds is easier than starting a traditional garden. Rather than removing well-established grass and spending days tilling the soil and working in enough organic compounds to grow healthy plants, you can simply build a small retaining wall and fill your new garden with a mixture of nutrient-rich compost, manure, and black dirt. You don’t even need to remove the sod first.

Raised-bed vegetable gardens can be easier to care for as well. For gardeners with mobility issues, getting down to ground level can be a challenge, but with raised beds, it’s easy to use a small garden stool for planting and pruning, saving wear and tear on your knees and back. If you build your raised beds Square Foot Gardening style, you’ll also be able to put more plants in less space, while having plenty of room to maneuver through your garden.

Another major benefit of building a raised-bed vegetable garden is that it improves the drainage system of the garden. Where many yards have compacted soil caused by years of foot traffic, raised beds are filled with new, well-aerated soil that offers better drainage – and doesn’t require you to buy an expensive tiller to get it. Not only that, but your garden will grow faster and produce ripe vegetables sooner because raised beds keep the soil warmer in the spring.

Raised-bed vegetable gardens can also be an attractive addition to your yard. You’ll find a variety of retaining wall options at nearly every home improvement store, so you can build your garden to match the surrounding landscape. Permanent bed structures can be made from durable materials such as cedar, cypress, or redwood, or from brick, stone, or cinder blocks.

Raised beds aren’t just for vegetables, and you don’t have to limit them to one tier. You can design gorgeous flower gardens with multiple raised beds on many levels to showcase a variety of plants. With raised beds, you’re not limited by the natural landscape in your yard, so it’s easy to incorporate water features or other interesting effects that might not otherwise work in a more traditional garden.

Designing and building a new garden doesn’t have to be a major undertaking. A simple raised bed vegetable garden can be built in an afternoon using supplies you probably have on hand. It can be as simple or as complex as you like, and can be used to grow nearly any plant from asparagus to zucchini. Best of all, by choosing a raised bed vegetable garden, you can start small, then easily add to your garden in later years.

Any plants that love well-drained soil can benefit from being grown in raised beds.  You don’t have to raise just vegetables.  You can also easily grow herbs, fruits, and flowers in raised beds and make your job easier.

In raised bed gardening, the soil is usually put into frames that are about three or four feet wide and any length.  The soil is generally enriched with compost, and is added to a frame made of wood or other material.

The plants in raised bed gardening are planted much closer together than the plants in a traditional garden.  This allows the plants to conserve moisture and also help block the sun from allowing weeds to germinate and grow.

Raised beds can be used to extend the growing season, making it easier to start seeds outdoors earlier, and grow later in the season.  This is a great way to get even more produce out of the area in a season.

If you have soil problems in your garden, you can use raised beds and just bypass your own soil completely.  If you start with completely fresh soil, it doesn’t matter what type of soil you had in your garden to begin with.

Another great benefit of raised bed gardening is the fact that the gardener doesn’t walk on the soil in which the plants are growing.  This helps prevent the soil from being packed down, so the roots can grow through the soil more readily.

You don’t need to till the soil under a raised bed if you don’t want to.  This is very beneficial for people who can’t afford a tiller, or who aren’t physically capable of handling a piece of machinery like this.

You won’t have to water raised beds as often as you would a traditional garden.  The soil in raised beds is designed specifically to hold on to water, so you can water less often and in smaller quantities.  This is great for conserving water and saving money.

Frames can be built on top of plywood bases, and then raised to any height.  This allows handicapped and elderly people to easily reach their plants to tend to them.  For people in wheelchairs, this could be one of the only ways they can garden well.

Diseases and pests are easier to control in raised beds.  Since you’re starting with fresh soil, it’s less likely to be contaminated with diseases that could infect your plants.  If your plants do become infected, you can simple dispose of the soil in that bed and start again from scratch. 

And pests are easier to control, because plants are in a more confined area.  This makes it much easier to spot potential problems, and it also makes it easier to get rid of potential problems before they take over your entire garden.

You can elevate your raised beds to provide extra protection against small animals.  You can cover bottom with chicken wire to help keep out small animals, and you can cover the tops with bird netting if you have a problem with birds eating your produce.

If you’re worried about weeds in your raised beds, you can mulch with good organic bark mulch.  You can also use black plastic or weed guards, but it probably won’t be necessary.  Most raised bed gardens don’t have a lot of trouble with weeds, and those few weeds that do appear are usually very easy to get rid of.

When your raised beds aren’t in use in the winter, you can add a layer of crushed leaves over the top of the soil.  This helps protect the soil, and also helps provide a bit of organic material for the soil.

If you have a disease infestation that comes from the soil, you should remove all of the soil from the bed and dispose of it, starting from scratch with new soil.  You’ll need to be sure to get rid of as much of that soil as you can.

You may need to add more sand or organic material occasionally to ensure proper drainage.  If your soil is drying out too quickly, or staying wet for too long, you’ll need to adjust the makeup of the soil.

Finally, it’s important to keep an eye on the material you used to build your frames.  If you’ve used untreated wood, this is especially important, because it can rot quickly.

You can build your frame out of standard lumber.  2×6 lumber is good enough for a frame that will house shallow-root vegetables such as radishes, lettuce, and spinach.  If you want to grow larger vegetables like corn or tomatoes, you’ll need 2×12 boards, so your soil can be at least 10 inches deep.

Opinion varies on whether or not you should use treated lumber.  If you use untreated lumber, it will rot within a few years and you’ll have to start your garden all over from scratch.  If you use treated wood, it has a small potential to leech toxic chemicals into the soil which might be picked up by your plants and passed to you.

If you want to be on the safe side, you should stick with untreated wood.  But treated wood is very convenient, and many scientists claim the chances of anyone actually being harmed by the small amount of chemicals that might leech into the soil would be miniscule.  This is a personal choice, so whatever you decide is right for you is just fine.

You should have your lumber cut for you when you buy it.  You need the lumber ends to be perfectly even so soil won’t leak out once you put your raised bed together.  This is extremely difficult to do yourself unless you have a large saw.  A circular saw or handsaw probably won’t cut it. 

You’ll need to use three 4-inch ribbed deck nails at each joint to put your frame together.  Other types of deck nails just won’t hold tightly enough to ensure your bed won’t fall apart until the pressure of all that soil and plant material.

You should assemble the frame on a flat, level surface, not directly in the garden if you can help it.  Your frame will be much sturdier if it’s assembled on your deck or driveway.  Then you might require help moving it to the garden, as it will probably be heavy.

You should leave a minimum of two feet between boxes, preferably three feet.  You need enough room to move around comfortably.  Be sure to choose a good location right from the start, because once they’re filled with soil, they’d be impossible to move without emptying them!

You can dig up or till the soil underneath the frames if you wish, but it’s generally not necessary.  Most plants will grow just fine in the 6 or 12 inches of soil inside the frame, and they should be able to push through the ground if they really need to.  As long as you provide very high quality soil with plenty of organic material, your plants should never need to shoot roots down past those 12 inches.

Your soil should be the highest quality soil you can manage.  You can purchase commercial potting soil, but it generally won’t be high enough quality.  You should add more organic material to this soil.  You can use homemade compost, composted manure, or other rich organic material to make the soil you use the best possible quality.

First of all, you should be sure to plant only those vegetables your family actually likes to eat.  Sure, those golden beets may be beautiful, but do you eat beets?  Do your kids like beets?  Is your spouse going to run away screaming if you try to serve them?  You should only plant varieties that you actually believe your family will truly enjoy.

The easiest plants to grow in raised beds include beans, Swiss chard, corn, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, squash, and radishes.  These plants are all great for beginners.  Herbs are also generally very easy to grow.  You should choose some of these easier types if you’re new to raised bed gardening or to gardening in general.

If you want plant vegetables that reach maturity very quickly, you can choose varieties that are better for this purpose.  Some of us can be very impatient.  If you hate waiting around to harvest your first vegetables, you can try radishes, spinach, lettuce, beans, beets, squash, cucumbers, carrots, and peas.

If you prefer to get your plants out as early in the season as possible, you should choose varieties that are especially good for early planting outdoors.  Some varieties you can plant four to six weeks before the last frost include broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, parsley, peas, and spinach. 

You can plant beets, carrots, radishes, and Swiss chard up to four weeks before the last frost.  You’ll be able to plan beans, corn, summer squash, and tomatoes on the date of the last frost.  And you can plant cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, and winter squash about two weeks after the last frost date.

If you want to extend your growing season as late in the year as you can, you should choose great fall vegetables.  You can harvest beans, Swiss chard, corn, cucumbers, eggplants, squashes, and tomatoes up until the last frost. 

Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, beets, carrots, lettuce, and spinach can all be planted just a few weeks before the last frost and will have time to mature before the frost hits.  And you can plant lettuce and radishes up to a week before the first frost in many areas!

If you’re a beginning gardener, you should probably stick to those plants you can grow during the normal growing season.  You won’t want to get too complex or too complicated when you’re just starting out.  You should stick with the easier varieties, and plant them during the normal growing season.

Also, be certain to choose varieties that grow well in your area.  You should check your USDA zone chart to be certain a particular variety of plant will grow well in your area.  Don’t pick varieties that won’t grow in your area, no matter how tempting they may be.

And be sure to choose varieties that will grow under your lighting conditions.  If you have a very shady yard, don’t pick vegetables or herbs that need full sun.  You need to work with the conditions available to you, especially if you’re just starting out.

There are many great benefits to growing plants in raised beds.  One of the biggest benefits is the ability to harvest more produce from the same space.  Raised bed gardens can actually double or even triple the amount of produce harvested from the space!  This is due to the fact that the square footage needed for pathways is reduced considerably, and more space can be devoted to the plants.

Another great benefit to growing in raised beds is the fact that you can improve your soil conditions more readily, and you can even grow plants in areas with extremely inhospitable soil.  If your garden is typically very sandy or you have a lot of clay, it can be difficult to grow much in it.  But if you create a raised bed, you can simply put your own purchased or created soil mix into the frame and grow your plants in that.

Weeds are also much less of a problem in the typical raised bed.  Because the soil is confined, it’s much easier to spot any weeds that do pop up, and the weed seeds in the existing soil are buried under far too much soil to sprout in most cases.

The frames can also be built with a bottom and placed on tables so handicapped and elderly people can reach their plants to care for them more easily.  This is a major benefit for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to properly care for a garden.

This type of gardening was made popular by Mel Bartholomew in his book and television series called Square Foot Gardening.  He developed a system that requires about 80% less space than traditional types of gardening. 

Instead of being just a standard raised bed, the bed is divided into sections that house plants of various sizes.  It uses special soil mix that is free of weeds and is ideal for growing almost any kind of plants.  It uses less water, is all organic, and uses far fewer seeds than traditional gardening.  His system claims you can produce 5 times more in the same space of a traditional garden.

The system divides each square foot into a grid, based on what type of plants you wish to grow in that section.  If you want to grow a large plant like broccoli or cabbage, it would take one entire square foot, so that section wouldn’t be divided at all.  If you want to grow radishes, you might section that square foot into sixteen separate spaces, each one housing a single radish!

Other similar systems have been brought out.  Cubed Foot Gardening is very similar to Square Foot Gardening.  The creator of this particular system is Christopher O. Bird, and he credits Mel Bartholomew for creating the original system.  Bartholomew even gave the system an endorsement!

You don’t have to use a grid system at all.  You can use a raised bed to plant a wildflower garden or an herb garden with no definable organization.  This works just fine.  You don’t have to restrict yourself to a grid-based system if you don’t want to.  Raised beds are very flexible!

Square foot gardening is done in 1 foot squares with 4 of them making up 4 foot by 4 foot blocks.  These blocks are a maximum of 4 feet because that allows you to reach into the entire planting area without having to step on the soil and thus compacting it.  Each 1 foot square can be divided into smaller squares depending on the space needs of each particular plant.

Gardening in squares encourages you to only plant what you want whereas gardening in rows tends to make you want to plant all the seeds inside the packets.  You want to end up with just the right amount of plants, not so many that you become overwhelmed and abandon your garden.  Planting the right amount of seeds to begin with also saves you time from having to constantly thin out your garden. 

Your squares should be physically divided, not eye-balled, for the best results.  You can use nails and string (being careful to put the nails where you won’t kneel on them or otherwise hurt yourself), or commercially-made wire dividers.

An example of a 4 foot block planting is 2 tomato plants in 2 squares, 4 bush squash plants in 2 squares, 1 eggplant in 1 square, 1 cabbage plant in 1 square, 1 pepper plant in 1 square, 2 broccoli in 2 squares, 1 cauliflower in 1 square, 16 onions in 1 square, 32 carrots in 2 squares, 12 loose leaf lettuce in 1 square, 4 marigolds in 1 square, and 9 spinach in 1 square (each square is 1 foot).

Square foot gardening works well when you make your blocks as raised beds.  When you build your beds on top of existing soil you don’t have to do back-breaking double digging and you can add a perfect soil mixture at the start.  With raised beds you don’t have to bend over as much so it’s easier to pick a weed or water by hand.

Not only can gardens be in squares instead of rows, you can probably fit the squares closer to your house.  The space needed is about 20% less than that needed for planting in rows.  By planting closer to your back door and not way out in some back corner, you’re more likely to see it, tend it, and harvest the vegetables when they become ripe.

The advantages of square foot gardening are many.  Not only will you plant only what you want and not too much, but you will be planting in better soil and in raised beds that are easier on your back.  No more time consuming double-digging and thinning out (killing) little seedlings.  You can plant closer to the house and you use your space more efficiently.  Try your hand at this method of gardening and I bet you will soon be enjoying the “fruits” of your labor.

Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work

• ISBN13: 9781579548568
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One of the bestselling garden books ever is fresher than ever! Ready to inspire a whole new generation of gardeners.

When he created the “square foot gardening” method, Mel Bartholomew, a retired engineer and efficiency expert, found the solution to the frustrations of most gardeners. His revolutionary system is simple: it’s an ingenious planting method based on using square foot blocks of garden space instead of rows. Gardeners build up, not down, so there’s no digging and no tilling aft

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Advantage 1.  Makes Better Use Of Space

A major advantage that raised beds have over a traditional garden it has better use of space.  In traditional gardens people usually plant in rows, almost  half of your garden space is taken up by the paths between rows! 

That’s a lot of wasted space.  But if you plant in raised beds, you save a lot of space, and you can plant more per square foot than you could in rows.  This means you can harvest a lot more produce from the same amount of space.

Advantage 2. Easier To Have Good Soil
 
In a traditional garden, you have to mix your compost in with your tilled soil.  This means you have to first use a tiller to loosen the soil. 

Then you have the back-breaking task of turning the compost into the soil.  This can take a very long time, and is very hard work. With raised bed gardening, you can simply use compost as your soil! 

You can choose to till the soil underneath your raised bed, or you can leave it alone.  Most plants will grow without the tilling of the soil underneath.  Then you can just fill your raised bed frame with compost and plant directly into it.  It’s certainly much easier than turning compost into existing soil.

Advantage 3.  Not As Many Weeds

Another fantastic benefit of raised bed gardening is the fact that you don’t have as many weeds to deal with.  Since the soil you place on top is generally fresh compost or soil mix, there shouldn’t be as many weed seeds in it as there would be in tilled soil.  Any weeds that do make it into your garden are easily spotted and pulled out.

Raised bed gardeners often find caring for their gardens much easier.  With fewer weeds and plants that are closer together, gardening becomes a pleasure rather than a chore.  It’s a great way to get more produce out of the space you have available, and it’s generally easier, too.