Raised Garden Vegetable Beds

There are many reasons to have raised garden vegetable beds bad soil, a body that doesn’t like getting up and down from the ground, they are attractive, and they are easier to weed.

If your interested in organic gardening you might want to check out my Organic Vegetable Soil post for some soil building tips.

Before getting crazy with the building of raised garden beds you need to find and check on the location where you are planning to put your vegetables garden. Your garden’s location is extremely important and not a step that is easy to undo and redo.

Vegetable gardens should be located near the kitchen door and not halfway across the lot. If you are going to maintain and manage a garden it needs to be convenient, or you might put off until tomorrow what you could be eating today, to misquote a phrase.

A raised garden vegetable bed is easy to maintain if you do not mind getting to it. Am I clear here? It should be close to the kitchen, convenient, not way out yonder.

The next item to check on with the location of the raised bed garden is how much sun the area gets. Head outside to your potential gardening spot every hour and see if it is getting direct sunlight. If the garden area is not getting direct sunlight it is not a good spot. You need at a minimum 5 hours of direct sun. You want more but sometimes we just can’t get more than the minimum. Look up, do you see trees up there? Trees above mean roots below which is competition for your vegetables. Trees are not allowed in our Raised Garden Vegetable Beds!!!

Soil is not so important in raised vegetable beds unless you are planning to use native soil to fill up your frame. If you are not using native soil you will be creating a mixture of your own or purchasing garden soil from a store.

The size of a raised garden is important, if you want to grow enough food to feed your family or just supplement your shopping trips you need to have a vegetable garden plan before you begin. Do a head count, a favorite vegetable count, and a hated vegetable count and start figuring out exactly what you are trying to accomplish with your raised bed or raised beds if you have a lot of people to feed.

Being able to get to your raised bed gardens is also important and I don’t mean being able to physically walk to the vegetable garden. I mean being able to weed every corner and the middle from whatever side you can get to. If it is the middle of the yard it can be much larger than if it is up against a fence. If you can’t weed it without walking on it you probably didn’t have the best raised garden bed plans that you could have. Ok back to the drawing board and start over.

The next few steps in raised gardens could be done in whatever order you want. Buying the additional garden soil and deciding the shape of the raised beds.

Another thing to think about before doing the vegetable garden planting is if you like flowers. If you want to plant flowers but do not want separated raised flower beds you can designate areas within the vegetable garden to have flowers planted. There is no reason you can’t mix and match your raised bed gardening style to suit all your needs.

Just because you are starting a vegetable garden does not mean all you can do is vegetable gardening. Flowers are great because they draw you out even when you do not need to harvest your food.

Time to stop reading and start planning so you can plant your raised garden vegetable beds.