Raised Beds are Great for Vegetable Gardening

I’ve only set my foot into the interesting, exciting and definitely healthy territory of home vegetable gardening, but I must say the concept of using raised garden beds has me blown already. Raised bed gardening is a simple and easy to implement concept but it can be very effective in improving the quality of your gardening experience and the produce. I can speak from first hand experience.

I have a medium sized yard to begin with and most of it is occupied by flower beds, so when I made the decision to grow vegetables I had to consider several aspects of garden design. So of the factors I had to consider were

1. Should I mix my vegetable plants with my flower plants and create a kind of a potager garden?
2. Should I dig out a part of my lawn and make it into a vegetable garden?
3. Should gamble with the risk of spoiling the aesthetic look of my garden by planting vegetables in the center of the garden?
4. How much effort am I willing to expend on this project?

I vetoed the concept of a potager garden because it looked like a lot of work. I was initially considering a flat bed for my veggies by digging up a part of my lawn; it looked like the easy way to go about it. Of course I had turned a blind eye on raised bed gardens at that time. Luckily I chanced upon this article on vegetable garden layouts, which deals with the various techniques of creating layouts for planting veggies, and realized the rich advantages that I could reap (no pun intended!) if I implemented a raised bed for my vegetable garden. These are benefits I experienced.

1. A raised bed structure can be created on top of the lawn without me having to dig it up. Less work for me and definitely more aesthetic.
2. I could get quality soil from the nursery, mix it with compost and use it for my raised beds. No hassle at all, just a little monetary investment though.
3. I am pretty decent with tools and carpentry so building a raised by structure using wooden planks (which I bought for cheap at the local carpenter’s shop) seemed quite easy to me. It hardly took more than a couple of hours to get the structure together.
4. I created two 4 feet wide square raised beds allowing for a neat compact look and creating lee way space to reach the flower beds beyond them. I could see that the raised beds did nothing to spoil the aesthetic appeal of my garden.
5. It looked like a more efficient utilization of space while planting vegetable crops (I used transplants).
6. The soil depth in my raised bed garden is close to 12 inches, I realized that my vegetable plants did not have to contend with my lawn grass, and flower plants, for water.
7. Fertilizing was easy as it did not impact the plants and soil around the raised beds.

The way I look at it, a raised bed allows you to control the soil conditions, temperature, water availability and even the sun light exposure. It makes life very easy because it is convenient to move around it without trampling on the vegetable plants. There is no mistaking the fact that a raised bed is a perfect structure for vegetable gardening. If you are beginner who has never experimented with raised bed garden I would urge you to give it try, even if you are only interested in flower gardening!