Simple & Practical Advice For Raised Bed Gardening

By Jonathan Beltran

After building a bed, from a kit or from scratch, you should be prepared to start raised bed gardening for real. Even though the bed is located in its final destination, it's just an empty space for now, right? What's coming next? Don't worry, because you can officially start having fun with your garden.

Use the proper soil, water properly and maintain your plants and keep them healthy, and you'll have a beautiful yard, with your raised bed gardening as a delightful focal point.

Managing Soil: pH Levels

One of the safer techniques for making a raised bed garden is also a simple one. Use a mixture of one quarter yard soil, three quarters compost and sand. This puts a solid base to start your gardening and should prompt some nice growth. Always keep track of your soil's pH levels, too. If it's overly alkaline, nothing will grow.

Weeding Out The Weeds

The way your raised bed garden is setup should help prevent weeds, but since when have plans ever gone the way they were initially drawn? Put organic mulch over the top of your bed as an added protective measure.

If the mulch doesn't do the trick, try using weed guarding products to make sure the weeds leave your garden alone. Don't worry, even if this doesn't stop the weeds at first. Gardening is a constant project, so you're going to experience setbacks every now and then.

Water Appropriately

It's just as unhealthy for plants to be watered too much as it is to be ignored. If plants stay wet for long period of time, disease will be more likely to form on the leaves and general bad health will result. To combat this, do your watering by hand and focus on the areas of the garden in which plants are buried and try to avoid watering surrounding areas as well.

Alternatively, you can pick up one of those irrigation systems. These handy contraptions use a dripping technology to water enough but not too much. Whatever you do, don't just hose down your plants.

Take Care Of Your Raised Bed

Though raised bed gardening actually requires little maintenance, there are still things you have to stay on top of as a gardener. First, obviously you need to water your plants as necessary, being careful not to overdo it. Next, try turning the soil over periodically, adding in new organic matter as you go.

If your plants should come down with disease, empty the bed and change out the soil using that same soil/sand/compost mix I mentioned earlier. Also keep an eye on the physical makeup of your garden, just in case it has started coming apart.

Raised bed gardening is a simple form of gardening that allows people with little or no experience to indulge themselves in a beautiful accessory for their lawn that will attract attention for years.

The tips above will keep your garden nice and safe -- both for the plants, and for you.

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