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Use Raised Bed Gardening

to make your gardening a little easier

Raised Bed Gardening is becoming more popular. With good reason, there are many benefits to adding one or more raised vegetable gardens to your veggie patch.

Raised Bed Gardening

Here are just a few benefits...

Easier to access

Easy to maintain

Great for areas with poor soil or drainage

Great for a No Dig Garden or Lasagna Garden

They look great!

I live on 25 acres, have fabulous soil that will grow anything and I have raised vegetable gardens! Why? It is so much easier to maintain at this height. My soil is too hard to dig, there are too many weeds and the chickens just love digging around in the "on the ground" veggie patch.

So how do you build a Raised Vegetable Garden?

There are many ways - the easiest is to pile up some soil - personally I prefer to have a barrier. You can use wood sleepers, cement sleepers, pavers, bricks or corrugated iron rings.

Some issues with these options: Most timber is treated with chemicals that can leach into your soil, pavers and bricks can look untidy, cement sleepers require a bit of work to install but worth the effort. Lastly the corrugated iron rings are lightweight, no chemicals and look good. I've seen plastic ones advertised also so let your imagination run wild...

Your Raised Vegetable Gardens can be as low as one sleeper high all the way to 800mm. This is a personal choice. If you are in a wheelchair or have a bad back 800mm is probably best for you, if not it will take a lot of soil to fill this. I think 400mm - 600mm is a good height.

How do I fill it up?

I use organic garden soil from the local sand and gravel yard, mixed with compost. Tell the yard that you creating an Organic Vegetable Garden so they give you the correct soil.

Raised Bed Gardening is perfect for the layering method or "lasagna gardening" if you prefer. Some gravel for drainage, hay, well rotted manure or compost, soil. Peat Moss is also great to add. There are no specific rules, use what you have access too. Remember no fresh manure for your veggies.

Fill the soil to the top as it will settle and leave a nice gap at the top.

Once you have added your plants you can add some Compost, Mulch or hay to help keep in the moisture. Mulching your beds will give the added benefit of improving your soil.

"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do." ~Galileo

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