Creating Raised Beds In Your Organic Garden

Raised garden beds have a ton of advantages over traditional ground-level gardening. In addition, they can look very attractive and give a unique appearance to your garden. They suit any style of home, and can help keep your garden organized and well maintained. Let's look at some of the advantages and the practical steps to setting up raised garden beds in your organic garden.

High raised beds. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Raised garden beds allow you to design your garden however you want. If you have a difficult shape to your yard, poor soil or limited access, you can change everything by raising the beds. You may have back pain or other problems that prevent you from kneeling and bending to regular ground level beds. Even somebody in a wheelchair can work with raised garden beds, provided they are high enough and there are good paths to navigate the chair around them.

For an organic garden, raised beds have the added advantage of making it much easier for you to see weeds and pests and deal with them in a way that avoids using sprays. Indeed, some pests such as slugs are less likely to bother your raised bed plants because they won't climb all the way up there, especially if you have brick walls on your beds.

When you get to building raised garden beds, you will soon discover that brick or natural stone is the best material to use. Of course, wood is also possible, but it has several disadvantages.

Raised beds with wood edging. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the problems with wooden edging to your raised beds is that it is likely to deteriorate. You would need wood that had been treated with preservatives, which is not the best thing in an organic garden. Those chemicals will leak into your soil as the wood slowly breaks down. After a few years, it is likely to sag. Eventually it will not support the weight of the soil any more. Compare that with brick and stone, which can be used for retaining walls that last a hundred years or more, and you can see the advantages of using more solid materials.

It is important not to make your raised garden beds too wide. You will need to be able to reach the middle easily. This is especially important for beds that can only be accessed from one side. The main paths through the garden will need to be wide enough for a wheelbarrow or wheeled trug so that you can bring in heavy items and dispose of waste.

When you are building raised garden beds you have the choice of what type of soil you want to fill them with. You could use soil dug from your own yard or you could buy something else, or you can take the lasagna gardening route. Take into account the acidity of the soil as well as the clay/sand mix, because these will affect the plants that you can grow.

You can grow anything in raised garden beds that you would grow in regular ground level beds, but you are likely to want lower-growing plants so that you can get to the tops of them. Keep taller plants to the middle of your raised garden beds and toward the back of the garden.