Raised Vegetable Bed

Raised Vegetable Beds are needed for area's with poor water drainage. If your current planting goals involve plants that require good drainage, I am sure you know how frustrating it is to have ground that just won't work with you.

Some plants thrive on the excess water that comes about from being in ground that lacks decent drainage. In fact with some plants it brings forth magnificent blooms.

However other plants just don't do well. It can cause them to drowned, you should always check the water required for your chosen type of plants. Make sure that the plants you have chosen to grow, agree with the ground you are planting them in.

Choosing a border is actually a useful step in getting your garden started. It might not actually affect the garden but having a raised garden is a fairly necessary approach for many people

Finding something decent looking to hold your plants can be a little bit more challenging.Sometimes lines running off a couple short metal poles works well, for plants such as tomatoes you will need some kind of lines for climbing trellis. You can find these at most any store though it is much cheaper to make your own,

The usual method for improving drainage for your garden is to create a raised bed. This involves creating a border for small area, and adding enough soil to it to raise it above the rest of the yard by at least 4 inches.

If you're planning to build a raised bed,if your chosen area is either on grass or on dirt the surface doesn't really matter the important thing is the need for drainage

If you want to start a raised garden in a non grassy area, you won't have much trouble. 2X4's work well for a border to retain the dirt you will be adding. After this has been created, you must add in the proper amount of soil and cow manure.

Depending on how long you plan to wait before planting, you will want to adjust the planting cycle to allow for any thing like composting that may occur.

Planting your plants in your new area won't be much of a problem. It is the same process as your usual planting method. The whole point of creating the raised bed is to improve water drainage.

If you live in an area where the ground is rough, dry, and with out a lot of nutrients, you might possibly want to test the soil and from those findings add necessary minerals along with your fertilizer.

Gerald Moran

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Lasagna Keyhole Gardening - Your Guide To A Successful Raised Bed Garden

Some people just naturally have green thumbs and the ability to make anything grow under any kind of circumstance. I, on the other hand, have two very black thumbs. How bad you may ask? Well, if you are a gardener you know that people who grow zucchini often end up with so much they are practically begging people to take them off their hands. This black-thumbed gardener, however, has two zucchini plants and so far this summer only one zucchini has threatened to grow while all the others have started and promptly molded, turned brown, or fallen off the stems. That's pretty sad, wouldn't you say?

Early this past winter while flirting with thoughts of living off the edibles in my garden, I read an article about keyhole gardening. These are basically raised bed gardens in the shape of a keyhole, exactly as the name says. The gardener stands in the longish section of the keyhole and is able to reach all parts of the keyhole within an arm's distance from all sides of the raised bed. The writer spoke of how this style of gardening has helped many people in parts of Africa feed and support themselves. I thought to myself that if they can do it in arid, hot regions, why shouldn't I be able to accomplish something similar here in Alaska, home of all things humongous?

Since it was January, the dead of winter and months still ahead to fantasize about giant green zucchini, squash, green beans, and the like, I continued my research. I read about a woman who did something called "lasagna gardening". She placed leaves, newspaper, grass clippings and dirt in layers which eventually broke down into compost.

There are different heights of raised bed gardens, probably as many different heights as there are different people and different tastes. My house is toward the bottom of a slope. My garden area consists mainly of clay which does not drain well and stays wet most of the planting and growing season. My attempts at low raised beds resulted in poor root growth for anything I planted, while grass and chickweed thrived, suffocating what few edibles did grow.

I decided to do a combination of the keyhole and lasagna style gardens. Pallets being discarded by stores around town became the walls of the keyhole garden. With the help of my long-suffering husband, we measured the area and then dug down approximately a foot into the clay to insert the standing pallets. The clay, incidentally, does a fantastic job of being glue, both for me when I stood in it shoveling and chopping, and to hold the pallets steady. Once the pallets were in place, with braces nailed at the corners for added support, we laid weed mat at the bottom of the bed. Then came all the fun stuff. Truckloads of black soil purchased from a place in town, wheelbarrows of long-dead leaves, brown glass clippings, truckloads of goat compost from a friend with more than she knew what to do with, newspapers, and cardboard boxes. We made layer after layer, at one point actually trying to keep track but eventually just trying to remember not to put two layers of the same thing in at once. I thought it was simply beautiful when it was finally layered to within six inches of the top.

At a height of four feet, and a distance of approximately 1.5 arm length from every side, it is very comfortable to work. I planted mint, catnip, pansies, several other flowers that my 7-year-old son chose, and strawberries. Oh my goodness! I thought it was beautiful before, but nothing compared to the bounty sprouting up from that layered mass of recycled materials and dirt. Everything I planted grew, and I did very little to help it along other than an occasional watering and oo-ing and ah-ing over it at every possible opportunity.

If you have difficulty growing and keeping your garden alive, try building this raised bed. Layer recycled materials such as listed above. If you are unable to find goat manure, rabbit is probably the next best thing. You may surprise yourself, as I did, with how well your garden grows!

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