Raised garden beds
There are some disadvantages in the ground being at ground level for growing plants not least the fact that you have to bend down to reach it. This problem can be solved by creating raised garden beds. This idea and way of growing plants and vegetables is a great way to give your gardening a lift and make reaching plants and flowers much easier for those people who find bending difficult. When you plant your flowers and vegetables in raised garden beds you do away with the problems of having to pull weeds first and turn the soil. No more digging out ocks and other assorted debris. Instead all you have to do is choose the location you want your garden bed to be in and lay down the raised garden bed retaining walls and then fill it with dirt or compost.
Raised garden beds have been in use for centuries in some places but are only now becoming popular because they make gardening easy and there are other benefits too. A raised garden bed will become warmer earlier in the season than a ground based garden bed, and this will enable you to start growing your seeds and plant small plug plants earlier in the season than you would otherwise be able to do.
When deciding to build a raised bed the first thing you need to do is to choose the height of raised bed you require and which materials you will use as the retaining walls for the bed. There is a wide choice of suitable materials that can be used to create your garden bed. Keep in mind that when you build a raised bed it must be strongly constructed to resist the weight of the soil it contains. You could use rocks which can be piled and naturally locked together or cemented together into a rock wall design. Bricks are very conveniently used to create a more formal looking garden bed too and using Wood or railroad ties makes for an easy and attractive raised bed.
Whichever materials you choose to create your garden bed you will need to ensure you have enough of the materials to make the bed as high as you need it to be. For some people garden beds just a foot or two tall is enough, while others want to create tiered garden beds which have multiple levels ranging from a foot or two in height, to four or five feet high at the highest level. You must decide how you will design yours according to your budget and other requirements.
You need to find the most suitable locations for your raised beds and move the materials to where they will be. That could be a problem if you are using a lot of heavy materials but most times it will be in somewhere convenient for access to transport the materials required to build a raised bed. Where you place your raised garden bed will depend on the size of the bed you plan to build and how much sunlight the plants will need and if you plan to plant a vegetable garden in your raised vegetable bed you will want to make sure the place where you construct the raised bed is in a location which gets at least five to six hours of sunlight each and every day.
With your materials and location decided, it’s time to begin the building of the bed and you should lay out your material according to the design you want for the garden bed and build the walls of the bed. Next you will fill it with enough soil to bring it to a couple of inches below the top of your garden bed frame.
Now comes the really fun part with the planting up of your bed. You may choose to start out by planting small starter seedling plants in your bed or sowing seeds directly into the soil but you can plant more mature plants if you want the instant mature garden look straight away. After planting your plants in the new raised garden bed you should give the roots a good watering to help the plants settle in and surround them with some type of mulch material such as tree bark or dry grass clippings to help reduce the drying out effects of the sun because raised beds can drain very well because they are raised above ground level so maintaining moisture levels is important.
