How to Set Up Your Raised Vegetable Garden Beds

Many gardeners are in love with the concept of raised vegetable garden beds, these vegetable beds can be placed anywhere irrespective of their distance from the ground, so the Gardner need not stoop for long,  or keep on digging, no tilling, or square foot gardening. Popularly called raised bed gardening, this method will relax the gardener’s back, and is fully scalable, as the Gardner can stack up as many beds he likes.

Making of the raised vegetable garden beds:

It is said that any decomposable material, like a pile of dirt or mounds of no-dig materials turn out ideal constituents of the raised vegetable garden beds. Wood is ideal for the stacks, but it is always criticised that treated wood boards often leak in, chemicals into soil. They can be replaced by timber/lumber drenched in linseed oil which will make them last for years in a go. Another alternative toward wood is bricks, rocks and concrete blocks. Similarly there are hundreds of ways to build raised vegetable garden beds; there is absolutely no digging involved, infact they are built from ground up, in a variety of stacks like boxes, crates, natural mounds, special constructed stands or even old tires. Now that is some good advice to set up your raised vegetable garden beds, in a cheaper way.

Advantages of setting up raised vegetable garden beds:

• It totally cuts out the back ache blues from gardening, just set the beds on the height that suits you the best, and you are done. Comfortable working, any time you like.
• Raising the beds, increase their surface areas, so the beds get a lot more sun shine, and warm up faster.
• Being at height it protects your beds from wanders like children and stray dogs to damage them. Moreover, while placing them at a height, their undersides can be lined so as to protect them from nibbling pests.
• Re-arranging your gardens could be much more simpler as you just need to move the bed stands

Drawbacks of setting up raised vegetable garden beds:

• Because they are much more exposed, they tend to dry out faster than the ground beds. So they need to be checked at a more regular interval.
• Cost of setting up can be higher, compared to ground beds, so make use of recyclable materials.

How to guide for building your own raised vegetable garden beds

• Site selection: keep following things in mind
  • Access to sun.
  • Surface should be flat.
  • Easy access to water resources
• Estimate the size of the garden: plan it out in such a way that your movement around it is possible, without any damage to the plants.
• Preparing the site for raised vegetable garden beds: the effort depends upon the depth of the bed planned, generally six-inches deep is sufficient. And to save on time, you can use cardboard and newspaper to cover and smother it.
• Construct the beds using rot resistant lumber as mentioned above, cut them of the desired size and make the ideal stand.
• Leveling of the beds is very important, if not done correctly, and then the water will run towards the lower direction and leave the higher end dry.
• Fill the beds with good quality soil, and make them fit for sowing seeds.

Maintenance of raised vegetable garden beds:

Raised vegetable garden beds require very less maintenance as they are away from destroying wanderers and rodents. The only issue is that they lose water faster, so you need to figure out how do you make your raised vegetable garden beds retain water.