Feb 03 2008
Tips On Building A Raised Garden Bed
Raised garden beds are a very practical addition to your home.
They are easy and cheap to build and maintain, and can be used
for flowers or vegetables. It is even easy to plant them and
weed them. In addition to all of these positive qualities, they
drain sooner and warm up faster than regular garden beds, so you
can plant earlier in the season. Planting early can give you the
chance at having multiple harvests of vegetables in a season.
The raised garden can be either temporary or permanent, and can
be a great way to enjoy yourself in your yard while adding some
decoration as well.
You should begin by ensuring you have all of the necessary tools
an materials needed to build with. The bed can be made of rocks,
concrete blocks, bricks, wood (use wood that is resistant against
rotting, such as cypress). You can also use treated wood, but
make sure that it does not have any harmful chemicals in it that
will enter the soil and into the plants. If youíre eating the
vegetables from a garden made out of treated wood, you are
essentially ingesting the chemicals yourself. Other materials
and tools that you will need are sheet plastic, a spading fork,
shovel, iron rake, hammer and nails, measuring tape, compost, and
topsoil.
If the garden bed is planned to be permanent, you should use
longer lasting materials. Also, if you plan to use the garden
bed for flowers instead of vegetables, bricks tend to look very
nice. As far as size goes, the bed should be at least a foot
deep, no more than four feet wide, but can be as long as you
like. If the bed is wider than four feet, it can be tough to
plant, water, or weed the middle or opposite side of the bed.
If you choose to make a temporary garden bed, you can change the
design yearly. They are good if you want to switch your
landscaping each year, as they are cheaper an easier to take out
and build a new, different one. Wood is the best material for
temporary beds because the wood can easily be taken apart. Also,
the look of the wood can change easily with the use of non-toxic
paint. Temporary beds should also be at least a foot deep and
narrower than 4 feet also, for the same reasons as the permanent
beds.
Planting your bed is the same whether it is permanent or
temporary. First, you need to prepare the bed by removing rocks,
sticks, and debris. Whether you build the bed on a patio or on
soil, you need to make sure that there is sufficient drainage by
having enough pathways for extra moisture to escape. Beds made
from bricks or concrete blocks, for example, can be assembled in
a staggered manner to allow room for water to exit the bed. If
you are building on soil, you should loosen the soil with a
shovel for proper drainage. After proper drainage is assured,
you can fill the bed with a mixture of compost and topsoil.
Then, rake the top of the bed until it is level and smooth.
You can now start to plant your flowers or vegetables. The tall
plants should be planted against a fence or a wall on the
northern side of the bed. Once the plants are installed, you
just need to make sure you take proper care of them. You may
need to water them more often than plants in a regular garden, as
raised gardens tend to dry out more quickly. Finally, add some
mulch to your garden and avoid stepping on the soil. The soil
needs to stay loose for the water to travel through it.
Did you know that a landscaped patio area can add as much as
12.4% to the value of a property! Once the patio is completed
it’s time to look at adding some landscaping as the next project
for your patio.
Join Keith Markensen as he jumps in to look at
brick landscaping borders and other uses for brick in landscaping. Keith pulling from his decades of landscape
experience and regularly shares his professional landscape
knowledge at www.Plant-Care.com
Tags: building, flowers, gardeb, planting, vegetables
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