Bed Gardening

If you are lucky enough to have space outdoors to grow a garden, you will be able to produce a wide variety of plants throughout the growing season, and add a useful and beautiful element to your home.

Starting a bed for the first time takes a lot more work than container gardening.

First, chose an area with plenty of sunlight throughout the day. Six to eight hours a day of direct sunlight is enough to sustain high yeilding plants.

Next, consider what kind of soil you are dealing with. If you dig straight down into the ground with a shovel, you should pull up a good cross-section of the underlying soil. Dirt should be a good mix of sand and silt. Moderate amounts of clay are acceptable, but if you find mostly clay when you dig below of the first few inches of soil, this won't be a good area to plant. Your garden needs to drain properly, and a high amount of clay will retain water and probably kill your plants. You can either have layers of the clay professionally removed, or you can build raised beds on top of the ground (see below).

Once you have an appropriate area to plant, think about the design of your garden. Make a list of the plants you hope to grow and look into the amount space each requires. This information can be found on seed packets or the labels of the seedlings. Keep in mind that too much space is preferable to too little.

Design footpaths through and around your beds so you can access each plant. This also gives you an opportunity to use stones or design elements to enhnance the look of your garden. If you are designing a garden near your house, consider the proximity of your favorite vegetables and herbs to your kitchen door. You are more likely to use or notice when these vegetables and herbs are ready to eat if they are close by.

Use a garden hose or stakes to lay out the shape of the bed. Then begin removing all sod, weeds, and rocks inside the bed area. Continue to turn up the exposed topsoil. This loosens the soil and allows oxygen to get down into the ground where you will be planting. Oxygen is good for the microorganisms in the soil that break down organic matter and release nutrients. A good tool for this is a gardening fork, which allows you to aerate the soil down about 10 to 12 inches. Mix compost into this topsoil to add nutrients. Finish preparing the bed by raking over the soil.

If you are planting plants that have already sprouted in a container, then you can insert the whole plant with the container soil into the ground, making sure none of the plant’s roots are exposed. If you are planting seeds into the ground, it is a good idea to add some topsoil or potting soil to the hole. Seed packets provide precise information about how far down and far apart to plant seeds. It's a good idea to keep your empty seed packets after planting, as a reference. It is also helpful to mark out where exactly you have planted what seeds with small stakes and labels.

Raised Beds

A good option for bed gardening in an area that does not have good quality soil is raised beds. Constructing a raised bed rather than planting directly into the ground can provide the proper soil and nutrients to produce high yielding plants, and allows the soil to stay slightly warmer and hold in more nutrients. These beds also have the advantage of excellent drainage. Raised beds look very nice, and can be an excellent landscaping element around your house.

To build a raised bed you need topsoil, which can be purchased or brought from elsewhere in your yard. When you remove sod, rocks, and weeds from the area where you want to build a bed, first cover the area with newspaper or brown paper bags. Cover this with the topsoil and compost and form into even, smooth beds. Beds should be between 3 and 4 feet wide and consist of 8 to 12 inches of dirt.

Use pieces of wood to enclose the beds as shown in the image. This adds an attractive element and keeps the soil and nutrients contained. However, it is not absolutely necessary. Raised beds also allow for naturally easy access to each plant.

At the end of the season, dead plants can be recycled as compost and reused on the bed. You may consider building your compost heap directly on the bed area, to enrich the soil in that particular area. When you reuse the bed in the next growing season, you will again need to turn the soil, add compost, and reshape any raised beds.

container gardening
community gardening
compost