RAISED BED GARDENING: Key to success early in season

By Pam Baytos

OSU Extension master gardener volunteer

Isn’t it ironic when we finally reach that point in our lives when our garden knowledge makes our beds stand up and shine, but spending the afternoon in our gardens sends us running to the chiropractor.

By building raised beds you are able to accommodate the growth habits of your plants, extend your growing season, make your landscape look tidy and save your body.

Your beds or boxes can be made from a variety of materials such as wood, brick, stone or metal. Just mounding up soil into 6- to 8-inch-high beds can make building raised beds simple to do without costing you any extra money.

Choose your height — from as low as 4 inches to as high as 30 inches.

Higher beds will allow for a place to sit while gardening or gardening without bending over. You may have different bed heights for different crops or different flowers.

For increased stability, install posts at the corners. These can be used to tie plants to guide them upward, or add temporary trellis structures.

Posts will give you something to tie off your tarps and row covers.

I recommend covering the boxes with tarps over winter to prevent them from filling with water, which could lead to frozen-solid soil, causing the sides to burst.

Row covers also will hold in heat, allowing you the option of planting crops such as potatoes around St. Patrick’s Day each year.

Most herbs and vegetables are sun lovers, requiring at least six hours of sun per day.

Locate your beds in an area that meets this requirement. Raised beds make first-time soil preparation easier because rich soil and amendments can be brought in at the beginning. Regardless of the condition of your soil beneath the ground, using amended soil for the raised beds allows you to build a better bed. This is an excellent time to put your compost pile to use. Amended soil in a raised bed also drains better, another way to grow earlier crops.

The added height not only reduces bending, but the soil warms up sooner than beds in the ground in the spring. This allows sowing and transplanting seedlings to begin weeks earlier.

At the other end of the season calendar, the raised beds retain heat in autumn, making an extra sowing of late season crops possible.

When plants are closer to eye level, monitoring them is easier. Problems can be caught and remedied before they become a major issue.

Scouting for both good and bad insects and applying fertilizer become simpler tasks. The adjusted height also simplifies sowing, thinning and weeding.

By arranging your raised beds with access paths on all sides not only allows for comfortable reach for tending and harvesting, but also makes your garden look tidy. Installing gravel or mulched paths gives your raised bed area a polished look.

To discover the easiest ways to build and implement a variety of raised beds in your garden, go to: http://go.osu.edu/raisedbeds