Raised Bed Gardening For Beginners

If you want to try a different method of gardening, then you might consider raised bed gardening. This is a type of gardening in which the beds are raised above the normal level of the soil. These are typically grown inside a wooden rectangular frame. This can either be filled with untilled soil or with tilled soil from your existing garden.

There are a lot of positive aspects to gardening in this way. For one thing, you can harvest much more produce while using the same amount of space. Raised bed gardening can actually increase the amount of produce harvested by triple the amount in this space. This is because no amount of pathway is needed which gives much more space for the actual plants.

Another benefit of the raised bed gardening is the ease with which soil improvements can be made. If you live in an area which doesnt have the type of soil that you need for your plants, it is much easier to add mulch or potting soil with enriched nutrients to the existing soil.

Weeding is so much simpler with this type of gardening too. Its much easier to pluck out any weeds which start up and saves much wear and tear on the gardeners back. Any weed seeds that are in the soil will be buried too deep to ever make an appearance.

The frames for this type of gardening can be built with a bottom and placed up higher so that the elderly and handicapped can readily reach them which make maintenance much simpler. This makes it much easier for people to enjoy their garden that normally wouldnt be able to.

Mel Bartholomew made this type of gardening very popular in his book Square Foot Gardening and his TV series. The system that he developed requires 80% less space for a garden than traditional methods. Instead of the regular raised platform bed, his system divides the bed into different sections so that a wider variety of plants can be included. It uses a special weed-free soil mixture and is perfect for growing any kind of plants. No chemical pesticides are used; it uses much less watering, and needs much less seeds than a traditional garden. With his system, actual produce yields are much higher than with the normal garden.

This system transforms each square foot into a grid. This depends on the size of plants that you wish to grow. It would take one entire square foot to grow plants as large as cabbage or broccoli so this section would be left undivided. For smaller plants, such as radishes, a square foot could be divided into sixteen different sections, each section containing a single radish plant.

There have be numerous variations of this system but they are all just copies. However, all have given Mel Bartholomew credit as being their inspiration. The raised bed gardening system is truly wonderful for those who have limited space yet still want a decently productive garden.