Do you love to eat fresh, healthy vegetables but don't have enough time to maintain a typical row garden? Well, in that case you are going to love raised bed gardening. These gardens can be best described as free standing garden beds constructed slightly over the natural terrain. But why raised bed gardens? The reasons are pretty simple and straightforward:
When it comes to growing fresh, nutritious vegetables in your raised bed garden, it doesn't really matter whether or not you own a fertile piece of land. It's nothing like the traditional forms of gardening. To grow a raised bed garden, you don't have to be an experienced gardener either - it is a lot easier to learn and execute compared to traditional forms of gardening. Some of the benefits of raised beds gardening include:
- Raised bed gardening helps you achieve a better control over soil type as well as condition; and because the soil warms up a lot quicker, you can get started at the earliest too.
- The gardening techniques are easy to learn - therefore even a new gardener can learn the tricks quickly.
- In addition, it is easy to add cold frames, fences, trellis etc. into your raised bed setup when you are ready for more advanced gardening.
- Because soil compaction rate is pretty low in this form of gardening, you are required to work much less - this of course is an added bonus for those who despite having the will, have not yet been able to embark on any gardening project due to lack of time.
- The production rate is also impressive because with proper planning and execution, one can easily utilize every single inch of a well-designed raised bed garden for harvesting purposes.
This book covers:
- Why Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening
- When And Where To Plant
- Preparation
- How to Build A Raised Bed Garden
- Types of Raised Bed
- Top Vegetables For Raised Bed
- Tips
- Why It Is Suitable For You
Planning your raised beds will take some time, and it is much better to do this on paper rather than wasting time and materials out on your vegetable plot. I did find that drawing my plot to scale on squared paper, cutting out the shapes of raised beds from paper and moving them around on the drawing worked well. It allowed me to maximize the use of my space and get the best possible layout without any work at all!
Many first-time raised bed gardeners make the serious mistake of creating a garden which is too large to look after - and this is precisely why you should always kick start the project with a lot of strategic planning. Choosing an adequate size and layout of a raised bed garden is perhaps the most important factor associated with the task. The bottom-line here is that just like any other form of gardening, knowledge and planning (or the lack of it) plays a pivotal role in determining the success or failure of a raised bed garden. You need to make yourself familiar with a lot of aspects such as soil type, the correct layout, the best amount of sunlight, wind protection and so on before getting started.
