Advantages and Disadvantages of Raised Bed Gardening
I think it depends on your gardening style and garden. Here’s my experience with this style of gardening. You can either make raised garden beds by mounding up soil or by constructing boxes (of almost any material) and then filling the boxes with soil.
hese are however essentially two distinct ways of gardening and I’ll try to explain this below.
The Advantages of Raised Beds
The soil warms up faster in the spring. It’s above ground level so the sun gets to work on it from the top and the sides.
They are closer to the gardener. Which is just another way of saying the gardener doesn’t have to bend down as far to reach the plants. :-)
A good raised bed can act as a garden when you don’t have enough soil (like my garden) or when you want to garden in a differently, decorative way.
Disadvantages of Raised Beds
They use a lot more water than soil-level beds.
Large (taller) beds act more like containers than garden beds so you have to modify the soils and watch your fertility if you are going to have truly wonderful gardens.
Can’t be walked on or if too high, over top of (you have to walk around them and this gives me more grief than any other characteristic of them - from a practical point of view in my large garden.)
You can’t use machinery such as rototillers to till or modify soil - it’s all hand-work. On small beds, this isn’t an issue but when I tried to make permanent large beds in the old farm vegetable garden (a very large one) then it quickly became apparent that I wasn’t going to do a lot of digging.
Mulch is tricky to keep on top of raised beds. It keeps wanting to migrate to the sides of the beds.
Expensive. I have to raise my garden beds because I have very little soil and this means the costs of 6x6 beams and the extra costs of fill and topsoil to fill up these beds.
In-ground raised beds (where you use a hoe or rake to create raised beds in a regular soil garden) are more work every year and this extra work isn’t worth it if you mulch heavily for weed control (heavy mulching will slow down the heating and reduce the main reason for using these barrierless raised beds.
Perennials and woody plants might have trouble overwintering depending on the nature of climate and the size of the raised bed (bigger beds make it easier for plants to survive).
The Answer to the Question
Should you use raised bed gardening techniques? It depends.
I use them because I don’t have much soil where I want to garden and my raised beds help me create the necessary depth. But I use them as large and regular garden spaces.
Are you prepared to use the increased amount of water they require? Any time you raise soil above the ground level, gravity will suck water downwards to the normal below-soil-level mark.
Do you want extra early crops of vegetables? Raised bed gardening is one answer for you and combined with other early cropping techniques can really make your garden come alive earlier in the spring.
Do you have physical handicaps? Then custom building raised beds may be the answer.
Click here if you have a question about raised bed gardening
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