Creating Raised Garden Beds
Raised gardens are a real treat for your landscape, one that will give your overall design a fresh, new, and exciting look! Raised garden beds make your colorful plants the center of attention without having to worry about the lawn mower taking over or the kids running through.

Posted Thursday, April 6, 2006

Raised garden beds add protection to your plants and their growth in landscapes that have high traffic paths. Raised garden beds are also another method of making your plants stick out from the rest of your landscaping. Raised garden beds are a solution for those who have tough soils, soils that are too much like clay or too rocky to start with.

To start a raised garden area, you will need to decide how large you want this area to be, and where you are going to place your raised garden bed. Creating raised garden beds is faster and easier than starting with a place in your landscape that you have to dig out. A raised garden bed can be filled with well draining soil for those heavy rainy seasons and still prevent the soil from washing away. To prevent the soil from washing away from your raised gardening areas, you can create, build or purchase raised garden bedsides. These can be made from bricks, blocks, wood slabs, even plastic materials. What ever materials you choose, you don't want to have to work with or change these materials for a few years, so make sure your choice is going to withstand the test of time, weather and water!

If you are starting with a preformed box or container as a raised bed, then you are off to a running start. You can mix soils and materials in the raised area with little trouble. If you are creating your own raised bed area, you still are going to have to build or form the raised area before filling it with materials and soil for the best possible results.

After mixing and preparing the soils that you are going to use in the raised garden area, be sure to top it off with a material that is going to keep the soil damp, such as a compost like bark or bark bits. This prevents you from having to frequently water your raised garden areas.