(Photo: raised beds provide convenience and savings)
Raised Beds
Raised beds save time on heavy soil work, preserve soil organisms, and reduce erosion, fertilizing, watering, and weeding. Tilling the soil is eliminated! Tilling increases weeding by bringing weed seeds to the surface and tilling chops up weeds which may significantly multiply the weeds from the many cuttings!
Gardeners can save labor by limiting and focusing on the growing areas rather than on the entire square footage of a plot, and by adding permanent walkways which eliminate the need to till soil that has been walked on or driven over. Gardeners stay out of the growing areas and work from the sides from permanent walkways placed around and between the productive areas. Permanent walkways eliminate the need to till, water, fertilize, and weed all areas not planted.
Traditional gardening is often composed of planted earth rows with a walkway between each row. Approximately ½ of the garden area is walkways and borders – all of which usually gets watered, fertilized, and weeded — often! Then at the end of a season (or next spring) the whole garden gets tilled for the sake of the compacted walkways and any rows stomped on during harvest and clean up.
Standard raised beds are usually 4 feet wide and as long as the space permits. The sides are usually 6 to 12 inches high and a second layer in the form of a castle can be added if more depth is needed.
(Photo: raised bed with castles at either end)
4-foot-wide raised beds with fixed borders of wood (seasoned but untreated and unpainted), shale, rocks, bricks, or plastic (UV resistant) with permanent paths between maximize the space planted by reducing the number of paths needed, gardeners have fewer chances of stepping on the productive soil, dense planting is practical, and the soil is flat rather than mounded so no fear of water, fertilizer and seeds washing off down the sides. In some cases, raised beds with permanent walkways can prevent border disputes between gardeners.
A “floating” raised bed is a bed that keeps plants from accessing the ground soil. This is particularly useful if the bed is on untested ground soil that may be contaminated or on a cement slab or asphalt drive or parking lot. The bed is the same as the standard raised bed with the addition of a gravel sandwich at the base: landscape fabric, medium gravel, and landscape fabric. Castles may be desirable due to the limited soil depth.
(Photo: floating raised beds on untested ground)
Permanent walkway options between raised beds:
Organic – grass clippings, shredded leaves, cut weeds (seedless), creeping thyme, straw, bark, wood chips, Dutch white clover, live grass, or nature’s choice (the last 3 must be mowed and whipped regularly to keep green growth under control). I mow Dutch clover to 1 inch every cut; live grass gets mowed to 1 inch in spring and fall, but 3 inches in the heat of summer; nature’s choice gets mowed like grass, but more often if the weeds start to go to seed.
(Photo: Permanent path of patio stones with room for grass or Dutch clover between)
Inorganic – patio, flag, river, or cobblestone; bricks or brick chips; pavement or tarmac.
Temporary – boards of unpainted, untreated wood or a supported plank (a bridge). Boardwalks spread a gardener’s weight like skis on snow and reduce compaction; planks supported like a bridge can keep feet out of the garden. I have seen a ladder used as a bridge but it is awkward to stand on and even worse to lie down upon to reach the soil below.
(Photo: Board as a bridge)
Caution: do not use treated wood which leaches arsenic or copper sulfate or old floor coverings which leach chemicals into the soil and leave bits of glue, rubber, synthetic fibers and possibly fire-retardant chemicals as they disintegrate due to weathering.
Tip: adding an underlay to the pathways helps prevent weeds and keeps small pieces of mulch from disappearing into the ground soil. Underlays are usually landscape fabric/geotextile which let water and air pass through for a time and then it may clog. Kept from the sunshine, the fabric lasts a long time.
Avoid plastic sheeting, or pool liners which stop water and air from getting to the soil, may encourage fungus growth, and may interfere with drainage by forming mosquito pools or canals of rainwater.
Note: A practice I have seen in some gardens is rows of high mounds of soil with rounded tops. These mounds may save you bending, and save your produce from floods like raised beds, but water, compost, nutrients, and seeds are easily washed off down the sides into the walkways. In addition, the soil collecting in the walkways reduce the walkways to seasonal paths that need weeding. The mounds will also need reshaping.
(Photo: high, rounded mounds with no water containment on the top)
Keep calm and carry-on gardening! Enjoy the savings in time, seeds, water, fertilizer, weeding, and soil preparation provided by permanent raised beds!
