Building Your Own Raised Bed Vegetable Garden

Building your own raised bed vegetable garden is not difficult but will require some physical effort on your part. Some materials you will have to purchase if you haven’t already got something suitable at home. Read on to find out more information on building raised gardens.

Choose your site wisely taking into consideration:

• sunshine – vegetables like a lot of sun
• prevailing wind – small seedlings need shelter
• shade – vegetables don’t grow so well in the shade
• easy access – for weeding and watering
• distance from the kitchen – the cook won’t like having to go far across wet ground to get pick the daily vegetables

The next step is to mark out the size of your garden. A good shape is rectangle. The length can be whatever suits your space, but make the width just wide enough so that you can reach the middle from either side without walking on the garden. By not walking on the garden you will save on the amount of digging as the soil won’t get compacted.

Now you are ready to put in place the retaining wall. Untreated wooden planks, bricks or concrete blocks are suitable. There are also available store bought kits, which need a little bit of assembly. Make the height to suit you. If you have difficulty bending down make sure the height is high enough so that you can sit on the wall and garden from that position. The above suggestions are more permanent wall options. Another suitable material for the retaining wall is to use bales of straw like oat, pea or whatever straw you are able to get (best if they haven’t been sprayed). Over time the bales will break down and will need to be replaced. Instead of throwing the old straw walls away add it to your garden, as it will be like compost.

Once you have walls in place a good idea is to put a weed barrier layer down first – this can be a thick layer of newspaper, commercially produced weed mat, old woollen carpet, or anything else you may have. This layer will stop what weeds are underneath from growing in to your vegetable garden. When the weed barrier does rot away you will find not many weeds will grow in your raised bed vegetable garden, and what do are easily removed.

Now is the time to fill your raised bed garden with a fertile soil mix. Some suggestions are, compost, any rotted animal manure available, old rotted straw and also some seaweed for minerals or any other organic material you may have. Mix this with some soil and you should have a very good growing medium for your vegetable garden. If there are any lumps now is a good time to break them up and rake over the surface. You have now built your raised bed garden.

Building your raised bed does involve some effort to set up but once it is done your vegetable gardening will be much easier as there is very little to do in the way of digging and weeding. Go on, take the plunge, build your own raised bed vegetable garden and reap the rewards of a bountiful harvest grown by you.

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