If you’ve never tried raised bed gardening, you really don’t know what you’re missing. You’re missing the chance to make your gardening easier, to make your flowers and vegetables more productive, and to make your plants produce earlier in the season.

Why Raised Beds Make Gardening Easier

For one thing, raised beds are raised up above ground level. That means you don’t have to bend over quite as far when you do gardening chores like planting, cultivating, watering, weeding, and harvesting.

If you’re like me, you pull weeds up the right way – by the roots. Well, just think about how easy weeding would be if you could pull weeds at knee-level, or even higher. With raised bed gardening, you decide how high you want to raise the beds. With raised bed gardening, everything you have to do is closer to your fingertips.

Why Raised Bed Gardening Makes Your Plants More Productive

Productive plants need rich, healthy soil. With raised bed gardening, you’re actually growing your plants in large containers – the raised beds. That means you can add peat moss and compost in your raised beds, and those soil nutrients stay put so they make nourish your fruits and vegetables, not the lawn or the trees or the weeds.

Why Raised Bed Gardening Produces Earlier Harvests

Have you ever set you tomato plants out too early in the spring? You want to get a head start on the season, and you hope the last frost has passed. You know you’re taking a chance, but you do it anyway. And the plants just sit there, shivering in the cold soil. Not so much with raised bed gardening.

In springtime, the soil in raised beds warms up faster than the soil at ground level. At ground level, the sunlight warms the top of the soil; but in raised beds, sunlight hits the top of the soil, and the sides of the raised beds. The soil absorbs all that heat and retains it, causing seeds to germinate sooner and roots to spread faster.

How To Make A Raised Bed Garden

You’ll be glad to know that making raised beds for gardening is one of the easiest landscaping projects around. Clear grass, weeds, brush and rocks from the area where you want to build your bed. Build walls around the area with lumber, railroad ties, stones, broken concrete, old tires, bales of hay, ceramic tiles left over from a project, broken terra cotta pots – just about anything that will hold soil in place can be used to build raised beds. Build you sides as high as you want your beds to be, and fill the beds with rich loamy topsoil, peat moss, and compost. Rake the ground smooth, and then plant, water, fertilize and harvest as you normally would. Your raised bed garden will do the rest.