More Landscaping with Raised Garden Beds
Once you have a weed barrier in place, then you simply need to build your garden bed structure. You can use any number of materials to create this structure, because essentially you’re creating a retaining wall for your new garden.
Bricks are a popular choice, as is stone, hard molded plastics, and wood. Which ever material you choose to use, you put it together into a frame like assembly. Your frame can be square, round, rectangular, or fluid. In fact, the shape you choose to create for your garden bed is only limited by your imagination and the space you’ve chosen to create it.
Once you have the garden bed frame created, you’ll then need to start filling it. Depending on the area you’ve placed the bed, you might want to lay an inch or two of rock or pebble at the bottom to help encourage proper drainage of the bed during wet seasons. This is particularly important if you’d laid down a heavy sheet of plastic for your weed barrier, because the ground beneath may not be an available drainage option for quite some time, since the plastic will act as a seal.
Newspaper, straw, wood chips, and other organic materials will allow water to seep through to the underlying soil, so there will be drainage for your garden bed naturally and over time those materials will decompose on their own.
The next step is to add your garden bed soil or compost. If you have enough, filling the bed full with compost is the best option, because it will provide the most fertile growing conditions for your new garden bed plantings.
If you don’t have enough compost to fill the entire bed, then add a good quality soil first. You can either fill the bed about three quarters full with that soil and then add the compost to the top, or mix your soil and compost together. You might also want to add in some water retaining granules, or use soil which has these already included. Since raised garden beds stay above ground year round, like containers they’re prone to dry out a little faster than in ground plantings are. So by adding some water retaining granules, you’ll help ensure the bed won’t dry out too much too quickly.
Once you’ve filled your new garden bed with soil and compost, it’s now time to put the actual plants into place. How you choose to plant them is entirely up to you. You can create rows, individual mounds, or just scatter the plantings randomly through the bed. Be sure you leave enough room for their growth and maturity though. If you’re planting seeds, there will be spacing instructions on the seed package. If you’re planting small seedlings and starter plants that you’ve purchased at the store, those will also have spacing instructions on them. If you’re not sure, then shoot for a minimum of six inch spacing, or just spread the fingers of your hand wide and make sure the new plants are at least that far apart. If they end up being too crowded once they’ve started maturing, you can always thin them out by removing some.
After putting the plants into your new bed, you should cover the top with a good layer of mulch. You can use straw, grass clippings, leaves, wood chips, or synthetic materials just like you would for in ground plantings. Just be sure that all exposed soil is covered well, and that your new plant’s root areas are also covered well.
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