Starting A Raised Garden

If you are wondering how to start a raised bed garden in your backyard you have to know how to pick the right place.

Starting a raised garden.

Drainage in a raised bed is superior to that in an in ground garden bed. Raised gardens make in possible to grow flowers and vegetables in nearly any area that has sufficient light. Find the right place. Here are my spring square foot garden plans for our four raised beds from a few years ago.

Each 4 by 4 ft. Move the raised garden bed frame to the sunny spot you ve picked out for the bed. Many gardeners prefer to construct raised beds from wooden timbers or other building materials like cement blocks or natural stone. However raised beds do not require a constructed frame to be effective.

Using a sod cutter or grub hoe skim away the grass layer. Using an edger or spade mark the ground around the perimeter of the frame. In this 10 by 60 ft. Set the raised garden bed frame aside.

A 12 deep bed provides ample room for most vegetable roots. A long raised bed with a trellis sits against a sun warmed wall and holds heat loving and vining crops. Garden small square planter boxes contain low growing edibles. You ll need 8 cubic feet of top quality garden soil to fill such a bed with 6 inch high sides.

A typical 4 4 raised garden bed has room for 16 square feet of growing space and any square foot gardening guide is a great starting place for a beginning gardener. A productive vegetable garden depends on good soil. Davis keeps a beehive for pollination but it s not essential. The square foot method in which you subdivide a raised 4x4 foot garden bed into 1 foot squares using a physical grid such as lattice strips is a specialized version of intensive cropping.

You have to pick a place with proper sunlight for the plants which will be the first step in starting a raised bed garden in your backyard. Specialized covers and garden fabric help you get started even earlier. A raised bed garden is a garden built on top of your native soil sometimes incorporating native soil sometimes not. Excess water drains better and soil warms up faster in spring compared to in ground beds.

With a raised bed you start fresh with the ideal soil blend even if the soil on your site is poor. Step 6 prepare the soil photo by ask this old house tv.