Raised bed gardening is a relatively easy method of gardening that I have talked about in previous posts. I wanted to go into more detail today about how to set up a raised bed garden. If you are interested in building your own raised beds, you can check out my videos about how to build a raised bed here. Also, if you want to come up with ideas about free raised beds, you can check out my post here.
Basically a raised bed garden is a raised bed that you fill with dirt. There are many advantages to this type of garden.
- You bring the soil in, so you are able to skip years of building up your soil that can be needed in a traditional garden. Here is a post about how to get perfect soil.
- You garden more intensively in a grid format which allows you to grow more produce per square foot.
- There are little to no weeds in most raised beds. Raised beds are not on the ground, so less weed seeds will get into your garden, and you control what you place into your garden.
- Raised bed gardening takes very little time. I only spent 5-10 minutes a day on my garden when I worked full time (and no time 3 days a week), but I was still able to provide fresh, organic produce for a couple of meals a day for my family for nine months out of the year.
How To Garden in a Grid:
When you plan your raised bed garden, you can plan what to plant based on a grid formation. You can just place stakes every 12 inches, and use string to mark off your grid. As an example, I will refer to a 4×4 raised bed, like the ones that I show you how to build here.
If you have a 4×4 raised bed garden, you will have 16 1×1 squares. You can choose what to plant in each square rather than a traditional garden, that you plant in rows. How many plants you plant in each square will depend on what type of plant you will be planting. You can plant 16 carrots into 1 square, but only 1 broccoli plant. For instructions about how to plant specific plants, check out my post here.
How Do You Decide Where to Plant Each Type of Produce:
- If you have plants that will climb and need to go up a trellis, you will want to plant these on one of the outside edges of your raised bed. You can just stick stakes on each end of one side of the raised bed. Then, you can use string, trellis, chicken wire, etc. to allow the plant to grow up the trellis.
- If you are planting large vine plants such as squash, pumpkin, or watermelon you will want to plant these in one of the four corner squares of your raised bed. Then, you will train your plant to grow outside of the box or up a stake. (You can grow small watermelon and pumpkin up a trellis, but I usually just let them run along the ground.
- If possible, plant from north to south so that all plants can receive sunlight throughout the day.
Using a grid formation is not the only way to use raised beds, I also have just planted in rows, and I have just scattered carrot seeds all around my tomatoes, but if you have a very small amount of space, using a grid format can allow you to grow more per square foot.
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