Build a Raised Garden – Tips on How to Build a Raised Garden

When you decide to build a raised garden, experience teaches that there are a few things to keep in mind to get the most from a raised garden bed. Here’s a look at a few tips on how to build a raised garden bed.

Tips On Building a Raised Garden Bed
By Keith Markensen

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 http://www.Plant-Care.com

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