Raised bed gardening is not the newest method of gardening, it has been around for a while but continues to be an extremely effective way to grow your favourite plants.
In the earlier days of raised beds, gardeners would double dig their beds to form a mound a couple of feet high with sloping edges. This would provide a bit of extra space in the garden and ensure proper drainage.
Nowadays, the ‘sloping sides’ design of the traditional raised bed has been replaced with solid frames made of wood, brick, concrete, and other materials. This allows the beds to be built taller without the possibility of soil runoff during heavy rain. It also enables gardeners to use the best type of soil for what they’re growing, instead of settling for what the ground naturally provides them.
There are copious amounts of modern raised bed designs, from kid-sized planters with legs to multi-level beds and so much more! Many of them can be made with little or no assistance, too.
And they all have so many benefits. In this post, we will be discussing just a handful of the many advantages of raised bed gardening.
Aeration
Proper aeration is essential for ensuring the soil’s microbial population is healthy. It also helps keep the aerobic and anaerobic bacteria balanced which enhances the soil fertility.
Whether you make your raised beds the traditional way or the more modern way with solid support around the edges, you will provide the plants with rich growing, loose structured soil allowing excellent air circulation around the roots.
It’s imperative for your plants’ roots to breathe if you want them to thrive. The roots breathe in oxygen – just like every other part of the plant – and excrete carbon dioxide. Sometimes, when the soil is very compacted, the roots struggle to respire efficiently and end up suffocating which leads them to fail to develop properly.
Drainage
Raised beds allow for excellent soil drainage, avoiding the waterlogged challenges of standard in-ground gardens. It also makes irrigation a lot easier and less wasteful, too.
Correctly installed drip irrigation systems will target the roots of the plants, ensuring optimum health and saving money on watering bills!
Maintaining better water levels is one of the best benefits of raised bed gardening, especially in climates that are regularly waterlogged. The loose texture of the soil allows water to easily seep through into the bed, preventing soil runoff and allowing excess water to drain away quickly.
On average, plants grow best in soils with around 25% moisture. Too much water can make it hard for your plants to breathe effectively and in some cases, it can even change the pH of your soil!
With raised beds, water gets quickly absorbed into the lower layers of the bed – keeping the soil evenly moist and preventing the water to stagnate.
Weed Control
A world without weeding would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?
Although raised beds won’t eradicate weeding altogether, it will reduce it massively due to your plants being more closely spaced within the soil. With less free space, weeds will find it hard to grow.
With in-ground gardens, even if you double dig the ground, you will often find the garden is overpopulated with weeds before you know it!
With raised beds, however, you can fill the frame with compost and soil pretty much free of weeds. And, the small number of weeds that do pull through can be easily removed from your much looser soil.
Pest Control
The type of raised bed you choose will affect how well you control pests in the garden. If you build a raised bed that’s close to the ground and made with natural logs, you’ll probably find lots of insects still find their way onto your leaves and sprouts.
However, if you choose to build a bed that’s quite high off the ground, you will likely reduce pest issues.
It is challenging to line your whole garden with plastic liners. However, with raised beds, lining the bottom and sides of the small area is a lot easier. That, along with a wire netting at the base will prevent the most hopeful burrowing rodents into your beds!
Less Mobile Gardeners
The great thing about raised beds is they can be built at any desired height and width. This means people who have difficulty bending and stretching can easily access their plants and vegetables by simply building taller beds.
For wheelchair users, you can simply space the beds perfectly to accommodate the movement from the wheelchair around the whole garden. Gardening, in general, can improve your health both mentally and physically, so it’s imperative to make your garden as accessible as possible.
In all honesty, most gardeners would be happy with bending down a little less in the garden, especially for the beds that need very frequent attention. Herbs and salad vegetables would be ideal in raised beds as these commonly need harvesting.
You Can Grow For Longer
In the early spring, it’s common to find the ground is still frozen, so it’s hard to make a start on planting. Raised beds, though, will thaw a lot quicker than the ground which makes it possible to transplant your vegetable seedlings earlier, allowing them to have a head start!
Some vegetables require a long growing season, and some gardens may only have a small window to grow edibles in the open. Onions, for example, need at least four months to grow from seeds and they grow best in the colder climates – so the earlier you plant them in your raised bed, the better.
As well as a head start, raised beds can also provide an extended finish. By adding hoop covers nearer the end of the growing season, you will be able to get grow for longer in the favoured environment.
Extra Space
Raised beds aren’t only more organised than your standard in-ground garden; they also take up a lot less space.
Flowers and vegetables inside raised beds can be planted a lot closer together which results in a lot more space being freed up across the rest of the garden. You could use this space to build more raised beds, create a cute little artificial grass garden patch, or even install a small water feature.
Moreover, traditional raised beds (ones without solid frames) provide extra space on the sides for planting. By planting on the sides, more room is freed up on top of the beds which can be used for more planting but will also allow more light onto your plants.
It’s harder to utilise this space with modern raised beds as the frames get in the way. However, many plants will eventually grow over the sides, if planted on the edges, which can then free up space for the top once more.
Author Bio
Kevin is an avid gardener and DIYer and enjoys reading related gardening and home improvement articles. Working for Grabco, he gets to see a lot of the projects that homeowners embark on and the resulting transformations. He also picks up a lot of fresh ideas and current trends, so enjoys writing about them to share with other like-minded readers.
