Why use raised beds?

Growing a backyard garden is an important and rewarding part of living a more natural, sustainable lifestyle. Planting a garden allows you to grow a variety of healthy herbs and vegetables without worrying about the effects of dangerous pesticides or the resources used to grow and transport produce. Other than that, there is nothing tastier than your own home-grown vegetables!

The benefits of raised garden beds

 With a raised vegetable garden, you can either stand or sit on a small stool and lean in from any direction available, never setting foot inside the garden bed. This reduces back strain as you usually bend over to tend to your plot on the ground.

 The soil inside the bed can be loosened up every year, easily.

 A gardener with raised beds can control better the quality of the soil and its ingredients. This includes creating specific environments to different plants in separated beds. For example, some plants do better with more acidic soil while others flourish with Alkali elements in the soil.

Another example to control one's soil is to keep it free of weeds. If you bring in soil without weed seeds and you take care of the ones who "landed" in your raised bed every once in a while, you will keep the bed weed-free, organically. 

 Raised garden beds help reduce the soil compaction that results from continually stepping, kneeling, or placing your hands on the soil. While these actions may seem minor, over time they result in compacting of the soil that reduces its pore space and prevents roots from penetrating as deeply as they should. All of this can reduce your garden yield.

 Raised beds are a great garden alternative for limited spaces, especially in urban and sub-urban areas.  A raised bed can be placed in a small back yard, on a balcony, alongside the driveway or on the roof of a building.

 protect your backyard garden from pests such as slugs and snails. In many cases raised beds can also prevent some home or wild animals from eating your plants. This can be done with stacking the raised bed or covering it with simple structure.

 Raised beds provide good drainage.

 Growing a raised vegetable garden allows you to start planting your garden even if the ground is still too wet for a traditional garden plot.