Raised beds make gardening easier in many ways. They help you solve difficult issues with your soil, they aid in controlling pests, they improve the amount of produce you can harvest in an area, they’re great at reducing weeds, and they help conserve water.
Any plants that love well-drained soil can benefit from being grown in raised beds. You don’t have to raise just vegetables. You can also easily grow herbs, fruits, and flowers in raised beds and make your job easier.
In raised bed gardening, the soil is generally enriched with compost, and mounded up above the level of the surrounding soil. Some raised beds are framed with wood or other material, but others are just left mounded, like the ones I use for my vegetables.
The plants in raised bed gardening can be planted much closer together than the plants in a traditional row garden, because the soil is never compacted, it's enriched, it's deeper, and usually irrigated. This allows the plants to make a continuous leafy cover over the bed, which reduces moisture loss from the soil by evaporation and also helps shade out weeds.
Raised beds can be used to extend the growing season, making it easier to start seeds outdoors earlier, and grow later in the season. This is a great way to get even more produce out of the area in a season.
If you have soil problems in your garden (including clay, rocks, or contamination of certain kinds), you can build raised beds on top and just bypass your own soil completely. If you start with completely fresh soil, it doesn’t matter what type of soil you had in your garden to begin with.
Another great benefit of raised bed gardening is the fact that the gardener doesn’t walk on the soil in which the plants are growing. This helps prevent the soil from being packed down, so the roots can grow through the soil more readily.
You don’t need to till the soil under a raised bed if you don’t want to. This is very beneficial for people who can’t afford a tiller, or who aren’t physically capable of handling a piece of machinery like this.
You may not have to water raised beds as often as you would a traditional garden. The soil in raised beds is designed specifically to hold on to water, so you can water less often and in smaller quantities. This is great for conserving water and saving money. However, raised beds are also designed to drain well, to keep plant roots aerated, and the often expose their sides to sunlight, and these can mean that you need to water more often. In hot, dry climates raised beds are often not the best choice: sunken beds which hold water can be used instead.
Raised beds can be raised up to any height. Frames can be built on top of perforated plywood bases (to allow drainage), and then raised to any height. This allows handicapped and elderly people to easily reach their plants to tend to them. For people in wheelchairs, this could be one of the only ways they can garden well.
And pests are easier to control, because plants are in a more confined area. This makes it much easier to spot potential problems, and it also makes it easier to get rid of potential problems before they take over your entire garden.
