Articles: Gardening

You don’t have to get down and dirty to get that beautiful garden you have always wanted. With raised garden beds, gardening is simpler and more comfortable than it has ever been before. Raised garden beds have a lot of advantages over traditional gardens, and they can be the perfect choice for you if you are looking for unique ideas for your garden design.

What exactly is a raised garden bed? Instead of planting plants directly into the ground, a raised garden bed is an enclosed platform that raises your plants a few inches off of the ground. These raised garden beds are usually enclosed with wood, so you essentially have little mini gardens instead of one larger garden directly in your soil. For this reason, many people turn to raised garden beds for reasons of lawn design. The raised garden beds can be designed in any geometric shape you like, so they can be used to create a pleasing design in your yard.

But there are many other benefits to using raised garden beds. One of the most important benefits is that they help you plants grow better. Every plant needs some air to get to its roots to grow properly. With a traditional garden, even though you make allowances for this fact and try to keep the soil loose enough so that air can flow down the roots, you can’t help but compact the soil in some areas as you move around the garden tending your plants. It is impossible to not compact the soil at all when working in a regular garden, and so your plants will be losing precious oxygen. With a raised garden bed, you don’t have to walk around your garden when you are working on it, so your soil is never overly compressed and your plants can thrive.

Because you don’t have to fret about leaving enough space around your plants to walk around (and you don’t have to worry about the soil becoming compressed), you can plant more plants in a smaller area. This also means you will have less weeding to do, because you can cut down on the area available for weeds to grow.

Raised garden beds can also help the health of your plants through efficient soil drainage. As any gardener knows, having soil that is too wet can be more dangerous to some plants than having soil that is too dry. Drying out the soil is a major concern for gardeners after heavy periods of rain, and in some areas of the Deep South, the soil may too wet all the time to plant certain types of plants. However, with a raised garden bed, moisture drains out quickly, meaning a hard rain is no problem at all. Further, a raised garden bed can make the soil that is too wet to grow anything into soil that has just the right amount of moisture for certain plants.

Another benefit of raised garden beds is that you can change your mixtures of fertilizers and other growing agents from bed to bed. There is no more trying to find the middle of the road combination that will give all of your plants some of what they need. You can group plants into beds with other plants that have similar fertilizer requirements, so that each plant is getting exactly what it needs to thrive. Likewise, you can cut down on the use of pesticides because you only have to apply them to the garden bed, instead of spreading them out over a large area.

All of these benefits of raised garden beds translate into plant growth that is around two times as productive as traditional gardens. If you are serious about your garden, consider raised garden beds.