Raised beds in the garden are not about sleeping in the sun. Well, they might be if you’re a cat (voice of experience). But I was actually thinking of them as in raised borders in which to grow flowers, fruit and vegetables.
Raised flower beds allow you to exercise absolute control over the growing medium in your garden, enabling you to grow rhododendrons and roses within mere feet of each other. These two particular species of plants prefer soils that are on polar opposite ends of the pH spectrum if they are to thrive. With one or two exceptions, rhododendrons like an acid soil; whereas roses prefer to keep their roots in a more alkaline envrionment.
The sheer flexibility offered by multiple raised beds opens up endless possibilities.
To begin with, because you need to fill the raised bed with new growing medium (eg soil) and fertiliser, you could create a delicious root-growth zone as deep as the bed itself. The deeper the better, as this would support vigorous growth in everything from trees to root vegetables.
And with depth we gain volume, which allows for less-frequent watering than pots, as the ratio of soil-to-root is higher and therefore more moisture is retained for longer.
Even with all of this moisture retention, the raised beds will be better drained than the regular beds around it (unless you live on the beach). This means the soil temperature will increase faster during springtime –which means earlier germination for your seeds.
And to top it all off, as the beds are raised above floor height, they are many times more convenient to work in, especially if you have mobility problems or even just an occasional bad back. There are even raised beds for sale designed to have wheel chairs pushed right up to them.
Building Raised Beds – a few pointers
- Do not make them too wide. If you can access the raised beds from both sides, make sure you can reach the middle easily. If only from one side, make sure you can reach all the way across.
- Do not build them where they block access points. But, on the other hand, you could build multiple large raised beds to dictate new pathways and block areas off as needed.
- The larger they are, the thicker the wood will need to be. For low-down raised beds no higher than 15cm, 2cm wide gravel boards will be fine. Any higher, then I would be looking at using timber as thick as up to 12.5cm depending on the situation.
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