Raised garden beds are a very practical addition to your home.

They are easy and cheap to build and maintain, and can be used

for flowers or vegetables. It is even easy to plant them and

weed them. In addition to all of these positive qualities, they

drain sooner and warm up faster than regular garden beds, so you

can plant earlier in the season. Planting early can give you the

chance at having multiple harvests of vegetables in a season.

The raised garden can be either temporary or permanent, and can

be a great way to enjoy yourself in your yard while adding some

decoration as well.

You should begin by ensuring you have all of the necessary tools

an materials needed to build with. The bed can be made of rocks,

concrete blocks, bricks, wood (use wood that is resistant against

rotting, such as cypress). You can also use treated wood, but

make sure that it does not have any harmful chemicals in it that

will enter the soil and into the plants. If youíre eating the

vegetables from a garden made out of treated wood, you are

essentially ingesting the chemicals yourself. Other materials

and tools that you will need are sheet plastic, a spading fork,

shovel, iron rake, hammer and nails, measuring tape, compost, and

topsoil.

If the garden bed is planned to be permanent, you should use

longer lasting materials. Also, if you plan to use the garden

bed for flowers instead of vegetables, bricks tend to look very

nice. As far as size goes, the bed should be at least a foot

deep, no more than four feet wide, but can be as long as you

like. If the bed is wider than four feet, it can be tough to

plant, water, or weed the middle or opposite side of the bed.

If you choose to make a temporary garden bed, you can change the

design yearly. They are good if you want to switch your

landscaping each year, as they are cheaper an easier to take out

and build a new, different one. Wood is the best material for

temporary beds because the wood can easily be taken apart. Also,

the look of the wood can change easily with the use of non-toxic

paint. Temporary beds should also be at least a foot deep and

narrower than 4 feet also, for the same reasons as the permanent

beds.

Planting your bed is the same whether it is permanent or

temporary. First, you need to prepare the bed by removing rocks,

sticks, and debris. Whether you build the bed on a patio or on

soil, you need to make sure that there is sufficient drainage by

having enough pathways for extra moisture to escape. Beds made

from bricks or concrete blocks, for example, can be assembled in

a staggered manner to allow room for water to exit the bed. If

you are building on soil, you should loosen the soil with a

shovel for proper drainage. After proper drainage is assured,

you can fill the bed with a mixture of compost and topsoil.

Then, rake the top of the bed until it is level and smooth.

You can now start to plant your flowers or vegetables. The tall

plants should be planted against a fence or a wall on the

northern side of the bed. Once the plants are installed, you

just need to make sure you take proper care of them. You may

need to water them more often than plants in a regular garden, as

raised gardens tend to dry out more quickly. Finally, add some

mulch to your garden and avoid stepping on the soil. The soil

needs to stay loose for the water to travel through it.

Did you know that a landscaped patio area can add as much as

12.4% to the value of a property! Once the patio is completed

it’s time to look at adding some landscaping as the next project

for your patio.

Join Keith Markensen as he jumps in to look at brick landscaping borders and other uses for brick in landscaping. Keith pulling from his decades of landscape experience and regularly shares his professional landscape knowledge at www.Plant-Care.com