How to Have A Successful Raised Garden Bed

Filling Your Raised Bed

Now it’s time to start gardening in your new raised bed! You’ve selected a good location that’s full of sun. You are near a water source to make it easy to water. Now you need to fill the bed with... so many choices! Did you know you had choices? You can go to your local nursery to buy the proper soil for raised beds, but you have a few other options open to you if you’re a bit adventurous.

Hügelkultur

Hügelkultur is one. Hügelkultur uses organic material, mainly of logs and branches, but could be much of what you would normally compost, to fill a portion of the bed and then top it off with soil. The idea behind it is that the organic material breaks down and supplies your garden with nutrients as the organic material breaks down. The composting action also raises the temperature of your soil, allowing you to start your garden earlier in the season.

Lasagna Gardening

Another option is a variation on this: lasagna gardening. In this version, multiple layers of soil, leaves, twigs and sticks are layered in the bed. The same effects, composting and warming, apply.

Have a Plan

Once you have filled your bed and it’s ready to plant. But wait, there are a few more steps that will up your success rate. First, have a plan. This will allow you to maximize your harvests.

Know Your Hardiness Zone

You will need to know your hardiness zone. If you’re in the US, you can find your zone here. The map will tell you when you can start planting and how long your growing season is. Choose plants that will grow well in your area. If you love kale but live in USDA Zone 11, you’re not going to be happy. Kale is very unhappy with temps of 80 F and above. Love tomatoes and live in USDA Zone 4? You have a very short growing season for tomatoes and you will need to pick a fast-developing variety.

Grow What You Love

Choose plants that you will eat. Radishes are easy to grow. But if no one in your family will eat them, then why bother?

Prepare for the Unexpected

Plan for Mother Nature to throw you a curveball. The weather is... unpredictable. Be prepared for cold snaps and heatwaves. For cold snaps and to extend your growing season use row covers to fend off frosts. This can add two to four weeks to your gardening season and extend your ability to grow cool season crops earlier, making for a longer harvesting season for plants like lettuce and kale. For heatwaves, a dripline can keep plants from getting heat stressed.

Keep a Journal

Next, keep a journal. Knowing what you did last season, and whether or not it worked, will help you the next season. This can be on your phone, in a spreadsheet, or in a specialized gardening journal. You would keep track of what and when you planted, the weather including the temperature, any pests or diseases, and your harvests. After a few years, you will have the information to guide you forward.

Plan the Space

Square foot gardening is one way. This is where the bed is divided into one square foot sections and planted. Another way is to find an online program that has the spacings and densities of the plants built in to allow you to diagram out your bed. Lastly, you can wing it. Just make sure you keep good notes and label what you planted.

Ready. Set. Grow!

You’ve planted and are watching your garden grow. Tending a garden requires paying attention, and this may mean visiting your garden daily. You need to watch for bugs and diseases. You need to make sure your bed gets the water it needs. Raised beds drain faster and will need water sooner than in-ground beds.

• Weeding is best done early and often. Small weeds are easier to pull and pulling them early means no weed seeds later. Pull weeds after it rains or after watering. It’s easier.
• Succession planting is planting the same plant, like lettuce, each week for three weeks in a row, which makes for a longer harvest of lettuce.
• Companion cropping is when you plant plants that play well with each other, like planting tomatoes and basil together makes the tomatoes taste better (the science supporting this is... limited, but tomatoes and basil are yum!). Nasturtium on the other hand, does attract aphids, and can keep them off your more valuable plants.

Seasonal Maintenance

In the Fall

You can let all the plants die back and let them sit over the winter. The exception is to remove any diseased plant material and throw it away in the trash. Do not compost. While compost does heat up due to bacterial action, many home composts don’t reach the 160F needed to kill pathogens.

In the Spring

There are two things that you need to do that will help you have a very successful upcoming second year:

1. Amend the soil: The plants from last year took nutrients out of the soil. You will need to replace them. One of the best ways to do this is to add compost. This can be store-bought or your homemade compost from your kitchen scraps, grass clipping, and leaves. Second, you only need to layer it on top. You no longer need to till the soil. Doing so is now considered to be detrimental to soil health and grows more weeds. Hard to believe, but the science is there. Save your back, and you save the soil!
2. Practice crop rotation: Don’t plant the same plants in the same place, year after year. Crop rotation keeps diseases and insects at bay by disrupting their life cycles, improves the soil structure because different plants have different root structures, and different plants have different nutrient needs. It’s about balance. And how do you know what not to plant in the same place? By reading your garden journal from last year!