Baby Steps Make Grown Up Gardeners. (2024)

What makes a complete raised bed garden and how can you grow the most food in one? Following are some simple tips and personal recommendations for beginning your food producing garden in raised beds. Learn raised bed gardening – building, soil mix, watering, veggies to grow, and more!

Building a Complete Raised Bed Garden

To being with, you need a raised bed. Lady Lee can teach you how to make a cheap raised bed out of pallet wood. That will be a great place to start!

After the beds are complete, are you done? Nope!

There’s still soil and water to consider.
Compost and even garden pathways to think about.
Not to mention, surrounding perennial plants like fruit trees and flowers!

For me, no garden in complete without perennials and pathways. Why?

Because a garden is a special place – like a schoolroom, a chapel and a playground all rolled into one. I’ve never only built raised beds and left my garden at that. I want fruit trees, berry bushes, herbs, ground-covers and even, in appropriate places, lawn.

Consequently, the following advice will include all those aspects. It is in NO WAY meant to be comprehensive. This is only a place to start your raised bed garden planning.

Here Are a Few More Articles to Help:

What to Plant in the Raised Bed Gardens for Early Spring

Plant in Raised Bed Gardens in Later Spring

Build a Vegetable Guild in 7 Steps

Increase Garden Yields: Creating Homestead Abundance

I also suggest you print out and fill in the garden journal provided by Schneider Peeps. There’s educational material, as well as planning sheets and record keeping.

Dirt for the Raised Bed Garden

One thing I’ve learned about gardening is that if you spend most of your time growing the best dirt you can, the plants will take care of themselves. Before you even think about seeds and plants, study up on good dirt!

For a basic and high quality mix of ingredients, here’s a recipe from Weed ‘Em & Reap, make The Best Soil Combination for Raised Bed Garden Boxes.

I would suggest spending a goodly amount of time creating layers and layers of organic matter in your raised beds. This process is sometimes called lasagna gardening or the Back to Eden method. To learn more on garden soil building, check out this little book below:

Don’t Dig Out Sod!

If you have sod (lawn) in the way of your garden, never fear! You do NOT need to dig it out. Put down layers of cardboard everywhere to cover the grass. Then start piling on the compost, mulch, even sticks and branches.

Sticks and branches, you ask?! Yep. This is a practice called Huglekultur. You can investigate Hugelkultur to learn more about the water saving properties of burying wood in your garden.

If you’re new to gardening, you may be a little confused on the difference between mulch and compost. Here are some thoughts on mulch and compost, and how you use them.

DIY Compost Ideas

I suggest learning to make as much of your own compost as you can. Quality compost in large amounts can really add up!

The first step in DIYing your compost is to decide what kind of composting system you want to use. Here are some options:

Traditional 3 Bin Compost System
Tumbler type system
Vermicompost system with two options – a tote system and a worm tower in the garden.

If you want to learn more about vermicomposting options, be sure to check out our book, The Do It Yourself Homestead.> Don’t have a copy? No worries, get yours here. For a FREE sample from the vermicomposting section, just shoot me an email at Tessa@homesteadlady.com and I’ll get that to you.

Speaking of Chickens for the Raised Bed Garden

If you’re lucky enough to have backyard poultry, and you need another project, consider building a movable chicken tractor.Chicken tractors are handy for moving the chickens to fallow areas in the garden. Hens clean up any unwanted bugs or garden scraps and fertilize as they go. This whole process will save you labor and time in weeding, tilling and fertilizing.

Even if the chickens live most of the time in a static coop, having a small, movable one can be really helpful.You can also customize a portable chicken coop to fit directly over your raised beds.

So, you have your raised bed garden set up, now what goes around and in it?

Water for Raised Bed Gardens

The most efficient watering systems are drip irrigation set ups, if you can afford them. You can have a professional install a system, but here’s a DIY way to install your own. You can deep water withdrip irrigation systems, which is something you have a harder time doing with sprinklers.

Overhead watering with sprinklers can encourage airborne diseases. Another problem is that, especially in dry climates like mine, a good portion of the water vaporizes into the atmosphere before it even touches the plants. This can get expensive and is wasteful, whatever your source for water.

I suggest learning all you can about various methods before you spend money and time developing a water delivery system.

Permaculture and Water

The more permaculture principles you apply in your garden, whether in-ground or container, the less you will need to water. If you’re new to the word permaculture, please read this article entitled What is Permaculture?

For example, when you apply top mulch to your raised garden beds, it can help hold water on and in the soil. Wood chips, for example, hold a good deal of moisture. They’re like magic.

Here are5 Ways to Harvest Water for the Homesteadfrom a Permaculture perspective.

–>>Learn exactly how much water you use by conducting a water audit on the homestead.<<–

Heads Up: The article above includes a FREE download for our newsletter members for conducting your water audit.

What to Grow

You can grow any vegetable in a raised bed that will thrive in your climate. Deeper rooted plants that spread their limbs like tomatoes will require a lot of space compared to a head of loose leaf lettuce, but they will both grow nicely in raised beds.

Sunny spots do well with these ideas for heat tolerant vegetables.
Here are 28 veggies to grow in partial shade.
Here are 13 herbs to grow in the shade.

Some gardeners figure the shady spots are dead space in their yard – not so! For either kind, watch the required root depth for each plant to make sure they’ll grow in the raised bed you’ve built. Some raised beds are shallow, some are deep. Which are yours?

The more foodproducing plants you can plant together the better – this is called guild planting!

Other Areas in the Raised Bed Garden Area

Remember when I said that I don’t think you should just stop planting at your raised beds?

The Perimeter

The area around your raised bed garden is a great place for an edible hedgerow.

Plant a few fruit trees, even if they’re only dwarf trees. Never underestimate the power of trees and woody bushes with flowers and fruits in the garden.

I order a lot of my fruit trees and other food producing perennials from Raintree Nursery. They sell many varieties of dwarf and semi dwarf fruit trees, bred to be disease and pest resistant specifically for organic, backyard growers.

Ground Covers Suppress Weeds

My current favorite ground covers are:

Alpine strawberries (produce a tasty, pineapple flavored strawberry)
Mother of thyme
Creeping potentilla

Here’s a post on groundcovers that might be helpful.

Ground covers are key to success in low lying places. As useful as some weeds are, especially for green manure and chicken food, we don’t want them taking over. Groundcovers can help keep them at bay. We grew salal and winterberry in North Carolina but our Utah winters are too harsh. What are your favorites where you are?

Grapes

You may have several places to trellis grapes which, unlike a fruit tree, can come into full production in their second year. Don’t forget grapes. Read here about the marvelous merits of Concord grapes.

Pathways

My favorite way to create pathways is with a cardboard foundation and piles and piles of woodchips. As you walk on them and the seasons come and go, the chips eventually compost.

Later,you can take that broken down material to help grow your soil, replacing the pathway areas with cardboard and wood chips to repeat the process.

I don’t tend to favor gravel because once rocks are there, they’re there forever.

Whatever material you choose, be sure to leave pathways a wheelbarrow’s distance wide in areas where you’ll need to be working with the soil, adding amendments and activities like that.

Do you have a favorite pathway material?

Mix it Up!

Most of us vegetable gardeners get so stuck on only growing the thing we always grow, that we miss out on some of the fun!

Edible ornamentals like small peppers, Swiss chard, kale, onions, leeks and all lettuces/mustards/chois look lovely as they grow. They are particularly suited for the front yard if you want to maintain some semblance of ornamental-ness to your garden.

Herbs, too, can be planted just about anywhere. Here’s a post on how to plan and plant a medicinal garden, as well as some herbal plants you should plant.

Start Some Seeds

If you get hooked on this vegetable gardening thing, I suggest you learn how to grow plants from seed. Learn all about Seed Starting Indoors from Tenth Acre Farm.

For those who plant out seed in the raised bed garden already, here are some wonderful posts on making your own seed tapes.

To learn to start seeds outside in boxes, often called Winter Sowing, grab your free planning sheets below.

Your local agricultural university may have a planting calendar they produce every year and/or suggested planting schedules for your area. Use them and save yourself from pulling out your hair trying to remember it all.