Gardening the Easy Way With Waist High Raised Garden Beds

It is fun and healthy to garden if the task is easy, not back breaking and something that people of any age can do without pain or discomfort. It is a known fact these days that many people have their own small gardens to help offset the costs of fruits and vegetables from their grocery bill. People everywhere enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables, but hate the back breaking kneeling, weed pulling, and being hunched over to work planting their tasty harvest. If gardening was made as easy as possible, could be portable, and not a chore more people would do it. If you have even just a few feet of space, you can garden with waist high raised garden beds.

This idea is really ingenious. I am sure there are many others kicking themselves for not thinking of it on their own. People that have knee and back problems can not garden without much pain and difficulty in a regular garden in the ground. With waist high raised garden beds anyone even those in electric scooters and wheelchairs can garden easily. This makes gardening on your deck, porch, patio, in your greenhouse, or in a wonderful spot in your yard easy.

Garden

The wonderful thing about these waist high garden frames is that they are easy to put together, very affordable, portable, and easy to transport when you move. The top reason many use them is that they can be reused year after year. When you use your own waist high raised garden beds you can also add things like trellises for your beans or tomatoes easily to the side of the frame. Setting up your own waist high garden is very easy to do with step by step directions.

Gardening the Easy Way With Waist High Raised Garden Beds

Each step is explained, and there are even instructions on how to set up your planting trays. Read the reviews and any other information that you can find on waist high gardening and you will be amazed that more people do not do this. It is common to see waist high tables in large greenhouses where they grow many plants in pots or trays. This is the same thing on a smaller scale. The plans that you can get to set up your own waist high raised garden beds can also be tailored for your own height with a few small adjustments.

Gardening the Easy Way With Waist High Raised Garden Beds

Victoria Rosendahl has been getting her nails dirty in the garden since she was 10. If you're tired of bending and kneeling to garden, visit http://www.garden-rack.com to learn more about GardenRack, the customized waist high raised bed gardening system that puts gardening within reach.

Raised Bed Gardening - How to Grow Well in Small Spaces

What is raised bed gardening and why should you be interested? It's planting that isn't done directly in the ground. It is -- usually -- done in some kind of raised bed gardening in containers. There are square raised beds, rectangular raised beds, and round raised beds. You can make a raised bed just about any shape you want and, yes, container planters are a form of raised bed.

You don't have to have land the size of Green Acres to garden successfully. You know what I mean -- land stretching out for days.

Gardening

You also do not have to grow vegetables in the ground. There's nothing out there anywhere that says a veggie garden will only be successful if you have an acre of ground to plant in.

Raised Bed Gardening and the New Homeowner

Let me tell you about my first house and the very first square foot garden I'd ever tended on my own. It was 1991 and I'd just closed on a townhouse in Marlton, New Jersey. It had fenced backyard but the previous owner's dog had really it ripped up.

Now, lots of women may have focused on things like window treatments or furniture.

Not me, boy. The day after closing I went to the home center and had them cut eight 1x12 pieces of lumber.

For those of you not familiar with the size and dimensions of lumber, the one is the thickness and the 12 is the width. I asked the lumber yard to cut these pieces 4 feet long for two 4x4 square raised beds.

After that, I went over to the garden center and picked up eight bags of garden soil. Why eight? 'Cuz I had no clue as to how much I'd need.

Then I bought some plants and some seed packets. I spent between and for everything.
I learned about raised bed gardening from watching garden shows on TV including Mel Bartholomew's TV show on PBS, "Square Foot Gardening".

Now, I'm not a tool belt diva. I had the rudimentary tools -- hammer, two screwdrivers, and a ratchet set. Hey, how hard can it be to nail four boards together to form a four foot by four foot raised bed garden box?

Harder than I thought.

I either needed someone to hold the lumber while I nailed or needed clamps or a vise. I discovered this after boards came loose and I had littered the air with blue words.

In the end, I got enough nails into the lumber to hold it together (I'm sure my neighbors had a good laugh watching me do this). The pressure of the garden soil also helped keep the shape of the raised bed garden box together.

The point is that raised beds don't have to be works of art -- they don't have to be structurally sound or be able to withstand a 7.3 earthquake. They just have to hold soil.

I grew lots of things in those to raised beds: tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, oregano, squash, beans, dill, basil, eggplant, spinach, musk melon (small cantaloupe), scallions, and fennel.
It's astonishing how much could grow in a small raised bed garden. I also did it with the help of vertical gardening using trellises.

One of the greatest advantages to raised bed gardening is that you control the soil content.

Let's say you've got clay soil like I do here in Tidewater Virginia. Not a problem. Build some raised beds and filled them with a mix of garden soil, compost and something to lighten it up -- vermiculite, perlite, peat moss, or even some sand. One thing you should know is to never use topsoil -- it's too dense and muddy.

I personally use Miracle-Gro products -- I like their water retention mix. Most of their soils have plant food already mixed in and you can buy garden soil, topsoil, and/or potting mix.

Every once in awhile, I'll combine garden soil with potting mix because the potting mix already has some perlite in it and this tends to be a lighter, fluffier soil.

One of the things you want to avoid in raised bed or container gardening is heavy soil density. It's like trying to grow plants in wet concrete. The lighter and fluffier it is the easier it will be for plants' roots to grow.

And raised bed gardening does not have to be on the ground. If you have a bad back or you have avoided gardening because you don't want to look like one of those pieces of bent over garden art -- you know the ones, women with fat butts in bloomers -- build your garden beds higher.

You can stack your raised beds on top of each other. Just make sure to anchor the boxes together so that the top box doesn't slip off the bottom. Or you could get wider pieces of lumber to make them higher.

You can grow just about anything in a raised bed. From potatoes to tomatoes to a cutting garden full of zinnias, you can do it in a raised bed.

The only exceptions would be really large-scale shrubs like azaleas and hydrangeas or trees. Although, you could probably plant dwarf trees in them. If you want to grow larger scale veggies like squash, zucchini, melon, or watermelon, you'll probably need most of one end of the raised bed for them to sprawl out in.

Garden Versatility with Raised Bed Gardening

Cultivating soil in a traditional row garden takes time. I don't care if your house is located on the most wonderful loam in the world. It'll still to take time to make it better. Using raised beds allows you to garden instantly.

And you don't have to put to raised beds on dirt or grass. You can place them on a deck or patio. If you do that, I'd either put some kind of bottom on the raised bed box or even set them on pallets (you can sometimes get old pallets from grocery stores for next to nothing).

The point here is when putting a raised bed on a hard surface like concrete, give the plant's roots some air. Make these beds a bit deeper by making the sides of the bed higher -- that allows for plenty of plant growth.

Raised Bed Gardening - How to Grow Well in Small Spaces

Victoria Rosendahl has been getting her hands dirty in the garden since she was 10. She writes a free monthly ezine, The Frugal Gardener, http://www.myfrugalgardener.com and has designed the ultimate raised garden bed, GardenRack, which allows you to garden without bending or kneeling. Check out her site at http://www.garden-rack.com or send her an email at info@garden-rack.com

Raised Bed Gardening - Getting the Soil Mix Right

OK, you have built your raised bed but now you have to fill it with a soil mix. This is where you need to be thinking before you build your raised beds of how deep to make them. A 3 foot deep bed takes six times the soil mix than is needed to fill a 6 inch deep bed so get your planning right at the start. I am going to discuss what I did when I sent my first High Density Gardening raised bed up.

My beds are 6 inches deep and I am amazed at what I grow but these are on the top of an old lawn. I would think about a deeper bed than this if you are building on a concrete base.

Gardening

If you followed the square foot gardening method, it recommends a third peat, a third vermiculite and a third home made compost. If you want to be organic you should not use peat and although it is 100% organic it is not a sustainable product. The other problem you will have on first starting up your raised bed garden is that you are unlikely to have any home made compost. Finally, vermiculite is made from a rock and is heated to a high temperature to expand it into the state we are all familiar with. I guess this is organic but the use of the high temperatures, over 1000 centigrade is not very environmentally friendly.

What I did when I built my first raised bed in my High Density Garden plot was to create a mix of the following ingredients. Top soil, peat, coir and well rotted horse manure. I mixed these in roughly equal quantities of a quarter each.

The top soil is just soil I had lying around from earlier gardening projects but I also bought a couple of bags from a local garden centre to finish the top of the raised bed off. However, do not make the same mistake I made. My father decided he would help out by brining me some top soil. He lives about 20 miles from me and what happened is that I ended up with weeds in my raised bed which do not grow round here. The topsoil I bought in bags had been sterilized so there were no weeds there.

The peat I used was old peat I had used in the greenhouse to grow tomatoes and cucumbers in. I know I should not use it and this year I have tried organic growing medium but I am not as impressed with it as with peat. I only used peat when setting up the raised bed vegetable gardens and this was peat I had used in the greenhouse to grow tomatoes and cucumbers in. I now grow my toms and cucumbers in organic growing medium and reuse this in the garden as well.

The coir I used is great stuff and is made from the waste product during coconut harvesting. It is 100% organic and is fully sustainable. I buy it in compressed blocks and re-hydrate it. The coir also has a great moisture holding capacity and this helps in your raised beds.

I used well rotted horse manure in the bottom of the beds. This is put down in a thin layer and then the other ingredients added on top and I just mix it all together as best as possible but at the same time trying not to disturb the horse manure in the bottom of the bed.

Every time I now add a new crop I just mix some of my home made compost in to the soil mix which does two things. The first is that it adds a source of food for the plants and the second is that it make up for settling of the soil mix and soil mix lost on plants.

By using a soil mix like this one it is very light and very friable or easy to work. Plant roots can easily grow down into your soil, moisture gets down to the roots easily and the added coir helps to retain moisture in the soil mix and the final thing is that it is very easy to pull weeds out as they do not have a good hold in this light soil mix when young. If you get the soil mix for your raised beds right it makes gardening much more enjoyable and easier and your crops will be healthier for it.

One final point is to get your home made compost pile started as you will need to use this in the future to add to your soil mix. You can download a free worksheet on how to build a hotbox composting bin from the High Density Gardening website here.

Raised Bed Gardening - Getting the Soil Mix Right

Ric Wiley is an internet writer and gardener. His website about High Density Gardening can be found at http://www.highdensitygardening.com/home.html and his latest ebook is High Density Gardening.