If the idea of growing your own healthy organic vegetables has taken hold of you, sooner or later you will come across beautiful photos of raised beds. Just like I did. When I first saw an article about them, I honestly exclaimed with joy. First, because they looked beautiful. Second, because they looked easy.
If you have already had a garden, you know the battle with weeds. If you have not, you have probably heard about it. They grow faster and better than the cultivated vegetables you have planted, and they demand constant fighting.
So, raised beds are literally boxes or bottomless containers that you shape according to your own needs: how high, wide and long they should be.
My idea of gardening does not include constant digging and other exhausting tasks. It is mostly about pleasure, enjoyment and contemplation.
Material
You can build raised beds from almost any material: boards, stone, bricks or metal sheets.
We chose concrete blocks. Why didn’t we make them from wood? Because wood rots in about 3–4 years, no matter what you impregnate it with. Also, there were already stone beds built in the garden.
If you decide to make them from wood, avoid walnut, maple or old railway sleepers. They can release toxic substances into the soil. Choose the thickest boards possible.
Metal sheets conduct heat very well, and on hot summer days they can literally bake the roots of your plants. Plastic is not a good choice either, because it ages in the sun and breaks. Still, you can experiment with any of these materials.
My observations of concrete blocks as a material: they work well, but because of the moisture they started to develop mould on the outside. This is not a major problem — mostly an aesthetic one.
Dimensions
My raised beds are built at a height that allows me to sit on them, and they are wide enough for me to reach the other side of the bed with an outstretched arm. It is comfortable. They can even be used as a little bench. In general, as you get older, you start wanting to work in the garden sitting down, lying down — you have to think about these things
Observation: it would be nice to place some wooden seats on top of the blocks, to give them a more finished look.
Soil
The first and most important thing was to lay some kind of insulating material at the bottom.
I chose landscape fabric, which allows water to drain downwards but prevents weeds from entering the bed from below. Some people also add a fine wire mesh to protect the bed from rodents. You can also line the bottom with pieces of cardboard or newspaper.
At this point, you have the chance to create the soil you want. Especially if you decide to experiment with just one raised bed at first, I would not save money on the soil. You can buy it in bags and mix everything directly inside the bed.
In our case, we brought in good forest soil with well-rotted leaves from the previous year. We mixed it with a little of the existing garden soil, added some perlite for airiness and generously topped everything with Californian worm castings.
The goal is to create loose, well-drained, fertile soil without stones or weeds — a place where your plants can grow happily.
The most important rule is: do not dig and do not step into the bed!
Some people promote so-called Hügel beds, which, in short, are basically a composter built directly into the raised bed. I do not have time to wait for all the wonderful processes that would take place inside that composter, so I make soil the expensive and fast way.
The other downside of a Hügel bed is that it settles quite a lot. The following year, you usually need to add almost the same amount of soil or compost from somewhere else.
So do not underestimate the soil you already have in your garden. You can always enrich it later with organic feeding.
I strongly recommend covering the space between the raised beds with weed-suppressing membrane and adding a layer of fine gravel on top. Even snow-white gravel is reasonably priced in builders’ merchants. This reduces the chance of weed seeds and spores spreading into the beds. And even in rainy weather, you can walk in and out of the vegetable garden with clean shoes.
What I Managed to Grow in the Raised Beds
My first vegetable season with raised beds was… let’s call it experimental, but also quite successful. I should mention that we have drip irrigation throughout all the beds, which makes everything much easier. I will explain how to set up drip irrigation in another article.
So, this is what I managed to grow:
two types of cucumbers, two types of gherkins, long sweet peppers, courgettes, pumpkins, melons, carrots, several varieties of tomatoes, several varieties of cherry tomatoes, Swiss chard, hot peppers, physalis — my surprising discovery — aubergines, both white and regular, green beans, and from the herbs: dill, parsley, coriander, rosemary, bay leaf, summer savory, thyme, spearmint, mint and lots of basil.
All of this without a hoe. The only tools I used were a small hand trowel when planting the seedlings and pruning scissors for removing tomato side shoots.
Do weeds grow? Yes, they do. Their seeds still find their way into the soil, carried by the wind, but there are not many of them and I can easily pull them out by hand. The soil stays loose all the time. I did not fertilise even once, because the Californian worms had created the ideal environment for my organic garden.
The vegetables had a strong start. I started all the tomatoes from my own seedlings, except for the earliest ones. I sowed them in seed trays at the beginning of March, outside, in a small cold frame. The weather allowed it, because temperatures were around and above 10°C. As a result, the plants became well hardened.
Honestly, I did not rely too much on those seedlings and had decided that if they failed, I would buy some from the market. But it turned out that I produced more than I needed, so I even had to plant tomatoes in pots.
It also turned out that quite a lot of the plants were Black Cherry tomatoes, which I simply did not have time to harvest. This variety is very tasty, but it is not really suitable for preserving, except for drying.
