by Mac Pike

Created on: July 27, 2009   Last Updated: September 26, 2010

When I put in my first vegetable garden almost forty years ago, I approached the project with more enthusiasm than knowledge. In the back yard I marked out a patch thirty feet by thirty feet that received full sun, rented a gigantic rototiller and ripped up the real estate like a maddened bull tears up the pasture. I planted my various seeds and plants and basically hoped for the best. Which as it turned out was not very good.

My tilling had brought all kinds of long-buried weed seeds to the surface and eventually the gardening process became a battle between the weeds and the weeder, with the weeder losing out. I do remember getting some nice tomatoes and eggplant but not much else, although rabbits, woodchucks and deer seemed to benefit from the rest of the crop.

I continued this sorry effort for two more years and then decided to get serious. I began reading up on gardening practices and techniques. I realized that a fence was essential if I wanted to defend the fruits of my labors from the local wildlife. I started a gardening journal that allowed me to record success, defeats and the reasons for each along with pertinent details of temperature and weather conditions. And I read about raised beds. It was love at first read.

Raised beds just make so much sense. For one thing, they allow you to create soil conditions that you might not otherwise enjoy given the native soil that came with the building lot. And, when you are planning out your garden it becomes so easy to allocate space to each particular vegetable when you are working with a discrete number of beds as opposed to amorphous open space. Keeping a record of what you planted in each bed year by year allows you to maximize the benefits of crop rotation. Also, each raised bed becomes an environment unto itself, and you can easily weed the onions, stake the tomatoes and mulch the chard taking each task a bed at a time and concentrating on the job at hand.

By the nature of the raised bed, it will warm up earlier in spring than a comparable plot of level ground, giving you a slight jump on the planting season. Similarly it will drain far better than flat ground avoiding some of the perils associated with protracted periods of wet weather. The flip side of this is that you will need large amounts of water during dry spells to maximize growth.

Here is how I build my beds today. Although there are many materials that you can use for the sides of the beds I prefer simple two by eight inch and two

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