Raised beds are one of the best ways to grow a garden when you’re short on space or don’t have the tools for a fully tilled in ground bed. We absolutely love using raised beds as one part of our larger homestead system and it’s easy to see why. Raised beds offer a certain degree of control and stability you won’t get with other types of garden plots. In addition, raised beds can come in many shapes and sizes to perfectly fit your gardening needs.
Let’s take a look at everything you need to know to get started with raised bed gardening.
Table of Contents
- Before Your Build A Raised Bed: Is Raised Bed Gardening Right For You?
- Getting Started With Raised Beds
- Constructing a Raised Bed Garden
- Soil for Raised Bed Gardening
- Filling Your Raised Beds
- Planting in Your Raised Bed
- Growing and Maintaining Your Crops
- Harvesting Your Raised Bed Garden
- Plan Your Raised Bed Today!
Before Your Build A Raised Bed: Is Raised Bed Gardening Right For You?
Raised bed gardens can fit into just about any space you could possibly want to put them, but they are not necessarily right for everybody. While we think most people will get quite a bit out of raised bed gardening there are some pit falls to be aware of.
The Cons of Raised Bed Gardening:
- Can be Pricey to Start
- Requires adding lots of new soil or transporting existing soil to the beds
- Drainage considerations must be taken into account
- Raised beds limit some growing spaces and can reduce hypothetical plot yields
- Minor maintenance is required
If any of these are a turn off for your gardening adventure, then maybe raised beds aren’t right for you, but these are minor cons. True they cost more to start than traditional in ground gardens, but they offer advantages in protecting your plants and managing your garden that are often worth it. Yes they take up more space than an in ground bed would, but they can also make spaces where in ground beds aren’t viable into spaces where you can now raise vegetables. Let’s look at some of the added benefits of raised bed gardening and compare.
The Pros of Raised Bed Gardening:
- Raised beds gardens are easier to tend
- Raised beds help control pests
- Raised beds are easier to water
- Raised beds are easier to manage for soil and fertilizer requirements
- Raised beds convert unusable space into gardens
- Raised beds are semi-permanent and can be used for years
As you can see there are a lot of reasons why you would want to start a raised bed garden. Chief among these for most people is their space. Adding a raised bed to your yard may be bit silly where in ground options will work well, but in cases where you had high clay soil, or don’t have soil at all, you can easily set up a raised bed and start fresh. Raised beds also offer a lot of great benefits when it comes to tending crops, managing water, and controlling pests, so they’re a no brainier for new gardeners who want to try gardening, but aren’t ready to commit to a full yard of crops.
Getting Started With Raised Beds
Before you even start purchasing materials for your raised bed garden you need to make a plan. While it’s fine to say you want to start a raised bed, you need to think about the things that go into it before you just spring into action. There are several key things you need to think about, but the first and most important is location!
Choosing a Location for Your Raised Bed Garden
Location is the most important factor for a successful raised bed garden. Let’s look at the specifics and ensure you plan out everything you need!
Sun Exposure
A majority of garden vegetables that you could grow will require at least 6 hours of full sun each day. When you’re planning on where to put your raised beds you need to be sure that you’re hitting at least that much and there aren’t any large shadows cast over the spot your planning for. We recommend checking by marking out a spot and checking the sunlight it gets each hour over the course of the day. It can seem like a long tie commitment for planning, but that garden might be there for years, so a day of checking isn’t much.
Soil Drainage
Even though raised beds often make drainage problems easier to deal with, that fact often causes people to skip this part of planning. Drainage is just as important now as it is with an in ground bed. If you build your raised bed in a low spot water might pool around the base. This can damage your bed, drown your plants, and throw off your watering. As a rule of thumb the best place to put a raised bed with have just as much drainage as an in ground bed could need. If you only have low or swampy areas, you will need to adjust by building your raised bed up higher and improving the drainage below it. If you’re placing your raised bed on concrete you will need to include a drain line from under the bed to give water a place to run off to.
Air Circulation
A lot of people think it’s okay to place a raised bed against a wall or fence if it gets enough sunlight, but this simply isn’t true. Not only will it lead to leaning plants as they only get sunlight from one direction, but it will reduce the amount of air they get and can leave them stunted. If you think back to anytime you’ve been in a greenhouse you might have noticed that there was always a gentle current of air running through. That’s specifically designed to help the plants breath better and get them fresh air. Plants don’t have lungs like us, so they rely on air circulation to bring fresh air to them.
On the other side of this, don’t put your plants in a breeze way. While they need fresh air circulation, putting them in extremely windy parts of your yard or spaces that funnel air over them too quickly can actually damage the plants. Moderation is key here and your plants should get a little breeze, but be broken under the force of the wind.
Access to Water
This one is kind of a no brainer, but plants need water. If you’re going to get water to them you need to have them near that water source. When you water you don’t want to have to fill a watering can a billion times and lug it out to where your plants are. We recommend you keep your raised beds in an area that you can easily reach with a hose. We typically limit our raised beds to no more than 200ft from a water source which makes them reachable with a longer hose.
Permits, Logistics, and HOAs
If you live in a place that has a lot of laws about how you can build, maintain, and use your property – you should move. Okay, we know that’s not practical advice, but HOAs are really the worst. We hate HOAs (Home Owners Associations) because they often tell people they can’t use their land for making food. HOAs often say you can’t keep chickens, you can’t have vegetable gardens in your front yard, and worse, they might say you can’t plant gardens at all. In some places HOAs even require that you maintain a full grass lawn and don’t allow for less wasteful ground cover.
Maybe your particular HOA is not so bad, we moved very specifically to avoid them, but if you’re planning a raised bed, or any garden for that matter, you’ll have to make sure it is inline with the guidance of your HOA. Furthermore, you may have local laws about gardening, structures, or water use that you need to know before you build something. For most people who live in the country this won’t be a problem, but if you live in a suburb or more urban environment you will have a lot more restrictions on how you can use your land.
With all these items in mind you’re ready to choose a location for your raised bed. Just be sure you’ve got your check list! Sun, drainage, air flow, water, and permits!
Planning For Scale: What Size Should My Raised Bed Be?
Planning the size of your raised bed is nearly as important as planning location. If you mess this up you can make a lot of extra work for yourself down the line! You can’t just build a giant raised bed, that defeats the point.
Raised Bed Footprint
Ideally you want to be able to reach each part of the raised bed from at least one edge of the structure. So if you can reach 2 feet into the bed the bed can be 4 feet wide. From there the bed can be as long as you like since you can reach the center from any side, but we recommend that you keep them in small individual units.
The point of aiming for smaller raised beds, 2x2s, 4x4s, or 4x8s, is to ensure you can keep better control over your beds. You will have more path space in between them for sure, but smaller beds are easier to manage and you can keep a better eye on them. If one starts getting a pest problem you can often notice and react fast enough to keep it from spreading to the other beds.
Raised Bed Height
After you figure out the footprint of your raised bed you need to decide on a height. This can vary from a foot to really as high as you like them. Our recommendation though is to build them higher rather than shorter. We like having a taller bed because its easier on our backs, it allows us to more quickly do a visual inspection of the crops, and in our experience, higher beds perform slightly better than lower ones.
A downside to taller beds is they are more costly to setup. You need to fill that depth with some dirt. For us we also put a bottom layer of lava rock (natural, undyed) to take up some void space and help promote better drainage. A taller bed might be a cost barrier for you if you’re making a lot of them, so be sure to price out your dirt before you make all your beds too tall.
Planning Your Paths
When you build multiple raised beds by each other you need to have room to work between them. We like to be able to fit a wheelbarrow through ours so we plan about 3ft between each raised bed. The space between the beds is really up to personal preference, but if you leave enough space you can cover the paths in wood chips and leaves which can be used to “seed” certain varieties of edible mushrooms like wine caps. This way your paths aren’t wasted space, but instead a vital producer of extra garden proteins.
Raised Bed Shape
Raised beds can come in all shapes and sizes, but we highly recommend you aim for functionality over all else, especially if you’re growing food. We typically only recommend, rectangular, square, or round beds. If you can plan out a different shape that allows you to plant efficiently, by all means go for it. We have seen in the past some gardens that are form over function and it just doesn’t work. It makes things a lot harder for you and it will ultimately end in less care being given to your garden or more hours put in from you.
Planning Plants for Your Raised Bed Garden
Aside from planning out the location and sizes of your garden, you need to plan out your plants. Some of these choices will effect the previous ideas and you may have to rethink some of your earlier ideas based on the kinds of plants you grow. We could have started plant first, but for raised beds that’s often counter productive as the huge amount of plant choices you have is overwhelming.
Instead of listing out every plant you could put in your raised bed, we’ll instead clue you in on the individual considerations you need to keep in mind when trying to choose any plant for your garden.
USDA Growing Zones (or Equivalent International Standard)
Not all plants grow in all places. To know what you can grow you should figure out what your USDA Growing Zone is in the US or if you’re located internationally look up your regional standard. These growing zones tell you a lot of information all at once. For example, a growing zone can be used to indicate which plants can tolerate that regions humidity, seasonality, temperatures, and pests. All of these things are important to keep in mind, but if a plant says it’s suitable for the growing zone you’re in, you can likely grow it with a bit of effort. You can check the USDA Growing Zones here.
Season
While your growing zone will tell you what you can grow in your zone, you still need to figure out when to plant certain plants. Additionally, you might want to start some plants indoors from seed well before they would be ready to go outside. Planting times and harvesting dates are also provided by the USDA (see previous section for a link), but you’ll also want to check with the specific information provided by the seed purveyor.
Water Requirements
Not all plants need the same amount of water. This isn’t normally a problem when you are planting just a single type of plant in a raised bed, but one of the benefits of raised bed gardening is that it is easier to plant multiple crops in the same space. Before we do this we need to check that the plants have similar watering requirements. If they don’t you might end up drowning one plant while parching another. It can really sour the whole experience if you mess it up, so plan appropriately.
Spacing, Root Size, and Root Depth
Spacing is a huge consideration when it comes to raised bed planting. You might be tempted to cram in as much as you can given the limited space of the bed, but you can actually lower your yields more by adding the extra plant than you would by just having one fewer. Tomatoes are a big problem when it comes to crowding, so take your spacing notes serious!
Beyond spacing just for plant nutrients, some plants have bigger root systems than others. Because of this the plants end up needing more space even if they don’t look like they do above ground. On top of this, the depth of the plants roots needs to be less than the depth of your raised bed. We like taller raised beds for this reason too. A taller bed allows for a wider variety of plants.
Companion Planting, Vegetables, Herbs, and Flowers
Companions planting is very important for raised beds to thrive. Because you have more control and the beds are easier to manage, you can get away with more meticulous choices for your plants. A single raised bed can have fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers all growing side by side. The problem here is that they have to be the right plants. Companion planting is the practice of identifying and planting together individual species that work well together and don’t compete for nutrients or space.
Companion planting is difficult and far beyond the scope of this article alone, but you can find more information on companion planting here. We highly encourage companion planting as it saves space, cuts down on the use of pesticides, and generally leads to larger healthier yields.
Raised Bed Crop Rotation and Cover Crops
Just because you’re growing in a raised bed doesn’t mean you can plant the same crops year after year without depleting the soil. Often you see traditional crop rotation being necessary on a four year cycle, but in a raised bed you can easily accelerate that by planting your crop rotation through the different seasons that span the year where you live. If possible you want to get as many harvests and replantings done each year as you can, and this will work as crop rotation.
To make this easier on you, if you are not going to plant anything functional, switch to a cover crop rather than leaving your soil bare. This promotes microbial and fungal ecosystems and the dying cover crop can be added back into the soil as a fertilizer for the next seasons plants.
A Complete Raised Bed Plan
At this point you’ve likely had to do a lot of homework. Thinking about location, space, plants, and more. All of this should have lead you to a complete plan for your raised beds. With a plan in hand it’s time to move on to more practical items in this guide and talk about building or buying your first raised bed garden!
Constructing a Raised Bed Garden
Raised beds are stupidly easy to put together, but they can come in many many forms. Don’t sweat the project if you don’t have the cash for a bunch of tools either, you can also choose prebuilt options or even go with our super ultra budget garden trick that we used when we were extremely low on funds.
Choosing Your Raised Bed Type
There are a lot of types of raised beds to choose from, so knowing the right one for you will be your first step. If you have a saw, a drill, and a way to get wood, you’re in good shape to build your own wooden raised bed. If you’re short on tools you might want to order a prebuilt raised bed. And if you’re on a shoestring budget, they a tote garden is right for you! Let’s look at each type and how they can be assembled.
Constructing a Wooden Raised Bed
When you’re building a wooden raised bed garden you’re size comes from the planning we’ve done earlier. While we could give you explicit plans here, they’re really not necessary. Our build is simple: pressure treated planks, Deck Screws, and pressure treated 4×4 posts for the corners.
To start you cut your posts to the height you want for your raised bed. The planks are then cut down to the width you want. We also cut our ends to overlap the longer side planks. You’d think it might be more complicated, but using the posts as your corners you end up with an easy sturdy structure at the cost of some internal space.
You want to use pressure treated lumber as it makes it more rot resistant. Additionally we recommend using a natural oil stain on the outside to help prevent rot further.
When it comes to assembly we simply line up our boards and mark out spots to drill pilot holes for our screws. We then move the boards to location and assemble with the deck screws. The raised bed ends up being super simple to put together and an easy project overall.
Once the bed is built, you may need to spend some time leveling it. Always level your raised beds! To do this simply place a bubble level on the edges of the bed and add dirt, rocks, sand, or bricks under the corners until the bed is level. Then and only then can you think about adding your dirt.
Buying Beds Online
There are a lot of great raised beds you can purchase online. For our money we would recommend buying a stainless steel weather resistant raised bed. The metal actually ends up being a really sturdy long term solution and we can’t recommend them enough.
The big downside to this is that they are expensive. The ones over on Epic Gardening’s website our easily our favorites, but unrealistically expensive for a casual gardener. You can find cheaper ones on Amazon, but you often get what you pay for. Before giving up hope if the ones online are too much, check your local farm supply or garden center. They sometimes have raised beds available for a steal.
Container Gardening
Container gardening is raised bed gardening with extra steps. Our very first raised bed garden was built out of garden safe plastic totes. We drilled holes in the bottom, filled them with lava rocks and raised bed soil from the garden center.
Did they work? Yes.
Did they work well? Actually, still yes.
Why more people don’t use totes for garden planters is beyond us. Sure they don’t look great and you need to do a lot of research to ensure the plastic is safe for growing, but they work perfectly fine and can often be acquired for $20-30.
The real big downside to using totes is that you cannot control there size or their look. If you find you need to resort to totes to save money, just make sure you have the cash to fill them with dirt as that can end up being the most expensive part for the cheapest option.
Choose What Works For You
Overall, no matter what option you choose you’ll end up with a perfectly suitable raised bed for setting up your garden. Don’t stress too much about the choice here and think of it as an early investment.
Soil for Raised Bed Gardening
Not all soils are created equally and you need to use the right type of soil for your raised bed garden. The instinct many people have is that any dirt will do, but you actually need different things for raised bed garden soil than you would for a traditional in ground plot. The type of soil you use affects your drainage, plant nutrients, bioavilability of those nutrients, and how your plant roots can grow. That’s just the tip of the iceberg too! Soil is way more complex than most people give it credit for, so let’s talk about what you need for your raised beds.
Soil Quality
The quality of your soil for your raised beds is much more controllable than when you plant right into the ground. A primary benefit of planting is raised beds is this degree of control you have and the ability to choose the soil that you will be using.
Quality soil means it is rich in organic matter, has a pH between 6.1 and 6.9 (adjusted for your specific crops) and adequate amounts of NPK: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (again, adjusted for your crops). It seems easy, but if you’re just piling dirt from your yard into your raised bed, you’d be surprised at how lack luster it is.
Yard soil can have a lot of problems, but often it is low in the NPK nutrients, high in clay which prevents drainage and root growth, and may have high or low pH depending on the types of plants that grew their before. Worse still you might have sandy soil which will drain too quickly and hold no water at all.
So how do you fix this? There are a lot ways, but we’ll tackle them easiest to most difficult.
Buying Soil
The easiest way to get good starting soil for your raised beds is to buy it. You can get it in bags at your local hardware or garden center, or you can buy it in yards from various specialty providers if you need a lot of it.
There is soil specifically made for raised beds, and that’s what you want. It drains a bit better and contains a little more NPK nutrients than typical garden soil.
This can be expensive, but is often worth the investment. It’s far easier to maintain good soil than it is to fix bad soil.
To figure out how much you need to buy you’ll want to figure out the cubic volume of your container which you can get by multiplying the length, width, and height together.
Adjusting Yard Soil for a Raised Bed
If you’re going to use yard soil, you’ll need to adjust it a lot of a raised bed in most cases. If you have sandy soil or high clay soil, we would still recommend you buy new dirt for your raised beds, but short of doing that you’re going to need to do a few things.
First you need to pH Test your soil. Then you need to get a soil test from a local soil lab (check your universities, they usually have one). You want to get your soil nutrients tested as well as run a test for any heavy metals. If your soil has heavy metals you need to buy your soil instead. You shouldn’t eat food that grows in soils rich in heavy metals.
Assuming your tests come back okay, they will tell you how to modify your soil appropriately. We could walk through all of those, but really, the best idea is to go get your soil tested and follow their recommendations. It will be far easier than us trying to walk you through do it yourself methods of testing and modifying. And if you think that’s a cop out, don’t. Every part of the US has access to cheap and reliable soil testing services. There is no excuse to not use them.
The one thing you will likely need to add that a soil lab won’t specifically recommend is organic material. Your soil is like a living organism. Its full of all sorts of life, from bacteria to fungi, and that life is important to healthy soil. We typically recommend you run a compost pile and add that compost back to your soil between crop rotations. If you don’t have compost you can often buy some to get started, but you’re really mostly trying to get the microbial system in your garden kick started again. Ideally, your compost should comprise 25% of your soil mix for starting a new bed.
Raised Bed Soil Maintenance
Soil needs upkeep to ensure that it is usable year after year. This seems weird because wild plants have no issue growing in whatever soil is around. While that is true the big difference is that we are tending the soil and removing crops. When we take organic material away from the soil, we are literally carting off things that would have added back complex nutrients.
This is chiefly why we add compost back to our soil between plantings. And furthermore, once a raised bed is established we add the compost to the top, we don’t till it in. This is also counter intuitive at first, but we want to disturb the soil as little as possible between planting and harvesting. We want the soil that is there to be a thriving microbial ecosystem which will better support our plants and ward off long term pests.
On top of composting we also run soil tests for our beds yearly. This is important, but not all of them have to be lab kits. pH testing and NPK testing can be done at home after the first set of lab tests are run and you can use box kits to ensure you’re getting things done right. Don’t try kitchen chemistry for this stuff, it’s not accurate enough to give you any good information.
Beyond simple testing the next thing you are looking to ensure is the that your soil is free of pests. Many pests work their way into your soil and lay a bunch of eggs. To prevent this you can check your soil for signs of grasshopper or aphids and apply appropriate natural defense throughout the year. If you fail to get ahead of this you may need to treat your garden with various anti pest solutions. Insecticidal soaps work well, but you can also get bacteria that infect common garden pests, or even buy loads of predatory insects like lady bugs, lacewings, or praying mantises.
Filling Your Raised Beds
Now that you know about your soil you need to fill your raised beds, but here, before you do that, we recommend you take some extra steps. We highly recommend you line the bottom of your raised bed with print free non-waxed cardboard, or garden fabric. This creates a barrier that will let water through, but stop aggressive weeds from crawling up into your soil. We also like to put 1-2 inch layer of drainage material at the bottom, such as lava rocks, which will keep roots from going too deep and help drain off heavy rainfall. From there it’s just dirt and compost all the way up. Easy as that.
If you want your wooden raised beds to last longer, you can use garden bed liner (not garden fabric) on the inside walls of your container before you fill it. This can just be stapled into place. In our experience it adds a good deal of life to your wooden out door structures. We don’t seal coat the insides of our beds as we don’t want our soil to come in to contact with those types of compounds if we can help it.
Planting in Your Raised Bed
So at this point you’ve got your plan, you’ve put some of it into action and built your raised bed and filled it with dirt, but now you need to plant your crops. Some of this was planned for in earlier work where you selected what you want to grow, but now you need to get those plants in the ground. Sure most gardening follows the same rough steps, but depending on what plants you’ve actually selected you may go about planting and caring for them in very different ways. This is the point where we encourage you to double check your plan and make sure you’ve got everything mapped out properly.
Before Your Plant: Make Notes
For each raised bed we keep a set of notes on our planting. These include simple thing: what’s planted, a spacing diagram showing planting layout, dates for when things where planted, and notes for their care. If we remember we additionally keep notes on what is started from seed or what is started indoors in starter trays. Typically this gets left off for us because we start 90% of our crops indoors anyway, but its is good information to have as the season pass.
These notes also get updated as we go with details about failures, pest problems, treatments for pest problems, soil maintenance, compost additions, yields from harvests, and any miscellaneous details that will help us do better in the next year. These notes are the backbone of a good garden and we hope you’ll take our advice and keep detailed documentation as you go.
Seeds vs Starters for Raised Bed Planting
Before you even put a plant in the ground you need to decide on whether you’re going to use seeds or starters in your raised bed garden. We mostly use starters as they generally fair much better in almost all cases. Things that don’t get planted as starters usually are plants like potatoes, garlic, or various bulbs which have little to no advantage being started indoors and actually do better without being moved around. That being said, was also don’t tend to grow many of these in our raised beds as they require more digging than we want to do since it can degrade soil health over time.
Seed starting is not necessary for a successful garden, but it can help you ensure success when you’re a beginner. The basic idea to starting seeds is that you want to grow them indoors in cell trays with a controlled amount of light, heat, and moister. This gives your seeds the best chance to get going and develop strong roots. Additionally, you can start multiple seeds in the same spot and simply cull the weak seedlings leaving only the strongest sprouts to be transplanted. This is a sure fire way to get your garden going with the best foot forward.
If you don’t have the equipment necessary to start your seeds indoors, direct sowing is also an option. Good seed packets will tell you how deep to plant your seeds and what care requirements they have. Furthermore, you’ll also want to plant several seeds in each spot and then clip the weakest, just like you would when planting your seeds indoors in cells.
Spacing Your Raised Bed Garden
You should know a bit about your spacing already, but it is very important that you give each of your plants the space it requires to grow properly. Even though some plants do well with crowding, you shouldn’t try that out on your first go and only do so once you are sure crowding will work. For example, we know some varieties of lettuce can be grown with no space between the plants, but we don’t plant this way unless we are certain we can pull it off. If you succeed the rewards are great, but if you fail you get nothing. Crowding is a risky gamble and the all or nothing approach to gardening is not sustainable.
Each of the seeds you buy will have spacing recommendations given with them if you get them from reputable seed purveyors. In addition to this some plants that vine will need trellises to be provided or you will need to arrange your vining plants to not interfere with the growth of their raised bed mates. While gourds or cucumbers might need more space, using their vines to shade the soil between your other plants can be very useful for temperature control and moisture retention. So, knowing your spacing is important, but also knowing how your plants are likely to grow is just as critical.
While traditional seed packets will often have details on spacing for rows, you can also plant your seedlings in grids and even mix plants of different types between each other. This will save you a lot of space as row planting is typically intended for in ground gardening where you need the row space to walk and harvest plants. Here in a raised bed you can treat plants as if no row is necessary and still get great results without crowding your plants.
Timing Your Harvests: Staggered Planting For Raised Beds
Planting everything you have at the same time can be a disaster if you’re not careful. If you’re growing a salad garden for example you may end up with 200 radishes weeks before your lettuce is ready. This is a problem not just because you wont get a full salad out of your crops at the same time, but also because you will get too much of each individual harvest if you plant everything all at once. When you are growing a raised bed garden you can stagger your planting to make the most of your time and space.
The best method is to plan for continual harvest. For example, if you’re attempting to get radishes, figure out how many you will use in a week and plant a few more than that each week. This will lead to appropriate sized harvests and give you enough time to use the crops you’re growing as they come in.
With stagger planting you can also fertilize and replant each space every time you harvest. This way you’re not wasting space between harvests. Sure you need to be careful about planting times and growing seasons, but for things like a salad garden you can easily harvest continually from late spring to early fall or longer if you rotate your crops and change up the varieties of items you are growing as you go. This takes a bit of careful planning and reading up on your plants, but you can do it if you are good about taking notes and keeping schedules.
Growing and Maintaining Your Crops
You can never get away with planting something and just leaving it be. While this sounds nice, in practice it rarely works out that way. We check our gardens daily as part of our morning routine and we recommend you incorporate your gardening schedule into your daily life as well.
Watering Your Raised Bed Garden
The biggest mistake that first time gardeners make is over watering their crops. Plants, just like people, can drown if they are submerged in water for too long. While for humans this is an issue of not enough oxygen, for plants it’s more of a problem with conditions that lead to root rot or inhibition of nutrient uptake.
The correct way to water your plants is to do so when the soil is dry. How do you know if the soil is dry? You feel it of course. Stick your finger in the earth and if it’s dry at two inches down or more, your plants need to be watered (probably, some plants need to have dry times to grow properly, please check a watering guide for each of your plants).
It is best to water your plants in the early morning. The cooler temperature before the sun comes up helps your plants get the water they need without wasting it. You also shouldn’t water as sunset because then the water will sit longer than you intend and can over cool the soil at night.
When we water our plants we soak the soil and you should get wet soil a few inches deep. It takes a bit of water, but it is often less than you think. When you are done watering you should never see standing water on your soil. If you do you have over watered or have a drainage problem with your bed.
When your plants are just starting out it is always better to underwater, soaking the soil then going longer without watering again, so that your plants will develop better root systems. Plants that are watered lightly and frequently will have shallow root systems and not grow well or withstand wind. In contrast when you soak your soil and water less often the plants will grow deep roots following the water down. This leads to more surface area on the roots, better access to nutrients, and better usage of water all together.
Watering properly is perhaps the most important thing you can do to get a good garden going.
Thinning Your Raised Bed
Thinning always feels wrong when you do it. Killing off plants that that are overcrowded or wasting a couple of seeds in each planting spot feels bad. This is not only good, but vital to your success. If you find your plants are doing poorly and crowding, thinning them out can save a raised bed. If you find your seedlings are competing with each other thin the sprouts. If you stared from seed directly in the garden then you’ve even planned to do this, so don’t hesitate and just get it done. Your raised beds will thank you.
Mulching Your Raised Bed
Mulching is a great idea to keep your soil hydrated longer, keep your root systems the right temperature, and keep your soil healthy. Mulch can be straw or shredded leaves for most gardens. Don’t use wood chips as they can attract molds and fungus. Some woods even contain compounds that kill plants and each watering can leech these out of the wood and deposit them into the soil.
When mulching make sure your source is relatively fresh. If you have rotting leaves or mulch it is best to add that to your compost and let it go. Instead add dry leaves or straw to your raised beds to get the best results. Yes it will rot even eventually, but this is more controlled when it is a thin covering on your garden bed.
Fertilizing Your Raised Bed
We recommend using compost as your general fertilizer. We often apply generous amounts of compost on our first filling and also we add a layer between seasons or plantings. You don’t need too much, but you do need it to be quality. If you don’t have compost and would rather use a store bought fertilizer you can certainly do so, just be sure to check the needs and tolerances of your plants before applying it directly to your soil.
We also don’t recommend using chemical fertilizers on foots that you are planning to eat. While we don’t keep a fully organic garden we also don’t spray fertilizer onto our plants directly. The less fertilizer we end up eating the better. The same goes for pesticides for us, but everyone decides what types of risks they want to take with their own foods. If you’re not growing food, but instead flowers, then something like Miracle-Gro works just fine.
If you are using a chemical fertilizer, you can apply small amounts every 2 weeks, but you should follow your fertilizers dosage instructions and gauge the usage for yourself. We tend to find that over fertilizing is often more harmful than helpful and err and the side of caution for our raised beds.
Weeding a Raised Bed
Weed your raised bed every day if possible. It is far easier to pick out a few weed sprouts daily than it is to keep up with it after weeks of neglect. The best weed prevention is vigilance and if you ever let your weeds take hold you may never get rid of them. Once things like Thistle take root in your raised bed you will almost never get rid of it as it can grow back again and again from from the same root system. We’ve been fighting a patch of thistle in our yard and it even grew up around and out from under a ground covering. So be better than we were and kill those weeds early and often.
Never use weed killer in your vegetable garden. If you won’t eat it, don’t put it on your food.
Pest Control for Your Raised Bed Garden
Pest control is a contentious issue for gardeners. We like to go a very natural route and introduce insect predators. Ladybugs, praying mantises, and lacewings are cheap and easy to add to your garden and they will control a lot of pests. Some people add garden spiders, but that’s not for us. On top of this you can use certain natural pest control methods such as introducing bacteria to the soil that will kill certain insect eggs or caterpillars.
Beyond insect predators and beneficial bacteria, we also put up bird houses, bug hotels, and add worms to our beds. These all make an easy to maintain ecosystem where these critters do the pest control for you. For larger pests like mice, rats, and racoon you need to put up deterrents. We use wire barriers on the edge of our raised beds when necessary and make sure to spray coyote urine on the edge of our yard regularly to deter these creatures and larger animals like deer.
If you really need you can fence in an area, which we needed to do for our fruit trees, but raised beds near the house often aren’t bothered as much as crops further out in the field.
If you must take care of pests without any of these natural items you have a few options for bugs. Bug traps can work great, but can also catch beneficial insects. We use these for rose chafers since they are poisonous and will kill birds if eaten. If they get into your garden they can actually get eaten by your chickens and end up killing them off too. Putting up simple bug traps of funnel topped rotting plants in bottles of water can trap hundreds of them quickly.
On top of bug traps you can use insecticidal soaps on leaves if necessary. This can kill bugs, but wont harm people and it often goes right on the leaves instead of the actual crops. These work okay, but if you use them you will need to wash your food when you harvest.
Finally for bug pests you can manually pick and kill these intruders. We do this as needed and over the season you might kill thousands of insects. We also like to give things like grashoppers to our chickens, so when we have them we just pick them off and put them in a lidded bucket. from there you just pour them into your chicken pen and few if any escape. If your chickens are too close to your garden you can leave the bucket covered in the hot sun for a few hours and the grasshoppers will die before you pour them out for your animals.
We don’t recommend pesticide sprays for our crops, but if you feel safe using them read the labels carefully and wash your produce.
Plant Maintenance for Raised Beds
Plants need more maintenance than just weeding and bug control. Some plants like peppers need pruning to ensure optima growth. Vining plants need training or they can choke out other plants in your garden. Potatoes need mulching and mounding to keep them from growing in the sun which will make them poisonous to eat!
In any event, this maintenance is specific to your plants, so make sure you understand how to care for the specific plants you are planning on growing. You can find many of these care instructions on our blog.
Harvesting Your Raised Bed Garden
Harvest time is a great time. This is when you literally get to enjoy the fruits of your labor! Again harvesting is largely plant specific, but there are some general pointers to consider before you tear up your whole garden.
When to Harvest
The best time to harvest plants is always the morning. This reduces the stress on the plant typically if you’re going to get extra harvests out of it, but for plants you harvest whole this really only helps you keep your soil most while you replant or cover the area.
If you harvest later in the day, just be sure you are fixing divots in your garden right away to avoid damaging the soil too much.
Learn How Harvest Your Specific Plants
Beyond this each plant is harvested in it’s own unique way. So the best thing to do is learn as much as you can about each plant that you intend on growing. Most plants are very easy to harvest, but some are a bit more complicated or unintuitive, so be sure to read up on them and harvest them right. Harvesting things improperly or too early can lead to lower quality produce and reduced secondary harvests. This is especially true for herbs where you are only taking some of the body of the plant and often not using the fruit of it.
Plan Your Raised Bed Today!
The best time to start planning your raised bed was yesterday, the second best time is today! With this simple guide you’ve learned the basics of getting started with raised bed gardening and you should be well equipped to not only plan out your garden, but also act on building it. While you will likely need to do a lot more reading to understand the specific plants you plan on growing in your own garden that should be the biggest hurdle left for you to face. If you’re looking for more advice on what you should grow in your raised bed, look no further than our blog, where we update regularly with advice on growing all sorts of plants and guides for just about any homesteading concepts you can think of. Happy homestead and good luck with your first raised bed garden!