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In My Garden Blog

July 3, 2008
Mid-Atlantic
By Charlotte Kidd,
Radnor, PA

Raised beds of vegetables can be as pretty as an ornamental garden, plus the bounty is delicious!

Raising Up Vegetables

One disadvantage of being a "professional gardener" is it's hard to relax around an unkempt garden. My fingers twitch, resisting the urge to pull every weed and move daylilies from shade to sun. No judgment here, just instinct. So garden tours can be stressful as well as inspirational.

Enter the tidy, attractive, raised bed vegetable garden that was the first sight on a recent visit to several private gardens north of Philadelphia. What a relief! I didn't want to lift a hand except to nibble young beet greens and pull an onion. Built along the property's driveway and near the kitchen, this collection of four 5-sided raised beds surrounded a classical fountain.

Wood or composite sides? Hard to tell. The beds' neutral borders and the wide, white/gray/tan gravel paths gave a spacious feel. Plenty of room to put baskets for collecting beans, chard, and lettuce.

Why Raised Beds?
Garden beds 12 to 24 inches above ground make for easier reaching, working, and harvesting. Experts recommend beds making raised beds 3 to 4 feet wide so plants are within arm's reach. Soil in a well-made and well-maintained raised bed is 8 to 12 degrees warmer than in-ground soil. Crops grow more quickly; vegetables are ready for eating sooner.

City gardeners say raised beds are the only way to grow food crops on lots cluttered with building debris or contaminated with who-knows-what -- lead, construction material, manufacturing chemicals. Suburban and country gardeners who've tried to muscle their way through dense clay, stone patches, or hard pan take to raised beds for their ease.

We of a certain age are contriving ways to make our raised beds even taller; 24- to 30-inch sides mean less bending.

In a raised bed, the gardener controls the soil mix. I like one-third mushroom soil, humus, and compost; or humus, leaf mold, and aged manure. There's limited space for weeds, especially if you plant a cover crop or green mulch such as clover. There's also less room and need -- meaning less expense -- for mulch.

A raised bed built of stone, concrete, or composite material may need the occasional readjustment. Untreated wood (pine is preferred) will need replacement every five or six years.

Planting Raised Beds
Vegetables need full sun so select a site with a southern exposure. Use the space to your best advantage. Doing a rough sketch and planning ahead are especially helpful in light of limited room. You can plant in rows or create triangles or squares to group plants with similar watering needs.

Put tall vegetables such as tomatoes and trellised vining crops on the north side so they don't shade other plants. Interplant cool- and warm-weather crops. That way summer veggies -- maturing beans, tomatoes, and squash -- fill in after spring crops of lettuce, radishes, spinach, and peas have reached their prime and are in the compost pile. Train winter squash vines around corn and trellised pole beans.

Come August, replace frazzled bean and cucumber plants with cool-season broccoli seedlings, Brussels sprouts, and new sowings of spinach and lettuce seeds. Bon appetite!

I would like to copy  this article for my own reference but there is
no user friendly version  permitting me to copy only the article and
not all the advertisements, etc. How about adding this feature.
Thanks.

Jeanne:
I select only the type that I want to keep of the article and paste
it into a WORD window. For any photo(s), I do another select/copy
and paste it under the type on the WORD document. When I save the
WORD document, WORD uses part of the first line of copy or heading 
for a title of this document, which is identification enough
usually, but you could create your own name for the article, when
you save it.

There may be a better way, but this is pretty fast and does work for
me (and will eliminate the advertising, etc.).

Hi Jeanne, NGA is planning for such a feature in the future. Thanks
for letting us know that you'd like a way to save specific
information.

Bountiful gardening!
Charlotte Kidd

Hi Nancy, I just tried your method. Works great! Thank you for the
work-around technique. I had to minimize the internet content window
to make way for the Word document. Then opened an older Word doc on
my desktop and chose the blank page icon to make a new document. Was
easy to copy, paste, and save.
Happy gardening,
Charlotte

My family have been using raised beds for years.  My mother suffered
a stroke and kneeling was out of the question, so my dad built beds
for all the vegetables so she did not have to bend over.  In her
flower beds, she used a wagon to sit on and it also carried all her
tools.  My mother-in-law has a tiny yard in the city so she uses
raised beds and containers.  My husband & I like the containers for
vegetables and herbs because of the hard clay soil and rock we have
on our property.  I used to use the wooden half barrels, but they
rot after a while, so we are now using the heavy muck buckets I sell
at the tack store where I work.  They are about the same size as the
wooden barrels - we just drill out holes in the bottom for drainage.

Thanks, Cathy. Looks like you and your family so love gardening
you've cleverly adapted to a variety of situations - from building
raised beds to tool carriers to container gardens.

So tack buckets last longer than wooden barrels? What size?

I've been an avid container gardener (organically oriented) for
about 25 years. First while living in a groundfloor apartment in
Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. Now in Wayne, PA because the area's
covered with invasive species. I rent and unfortunately have no
authority to eliminate them. I like large plastic or styrofoam pots
for tomatoes, peppers, basil, perennials, grasses, roses, shrubs.
Lettuces, bok choy, and spinach in plastic window or rectangular
boxes. Mediterranean herbs in clay or terra cotta. With warmer
winters, more hardy plants are surviving from season to season.
Blossoms up!
Charlotte

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