Raised and Elevated Garden Beds

    Raised garden beds are great for growing small plots of veggies and flowers. They keep pathway weeds from your garden soil, prevent soil compaction, provide good drainage, and serve as a barrier to pests such as slugs and snails. The sides of the beds keep your valuable garden soil from eroding or washing away during heavy rains. 

    In Kansas, gardeners are able to plant earlier in the season because the soil is warmer and better drained when it is above ground level. 

    Elevated garden beds are planter boxes on legs. By raising the soil level, elevated beds reduce back strain when bending over to tend the bed. This is especially helpful for older gardeners, people with bad backs or wheelchair users.

    Master Gardener Carl has produced two videos with instructions on building garden beds. 

• The first is a simple raised bed. 
• The second is a growing bed made from pallets which Carl has elevated on legs. He includes tips on materials, tools and soil.

Tips for building your own raised or elevated bed:

• Lay out the beds so they are horizontally facing south. This assures equal light exposure to all the plants growing in the bed.
• If the ground has never been used for gardening, it should be turned over and any rocks, roots or other debris removed.
• If your garden has burrowing pests such as moles, a layer of 1/2" or 1/4" hardware cloth (galvanized mesh) can be laid across the bottom and 3" up the sides before soil is added
• Raised beds do not have bottoms; they are open to the ground, which offers the benefit of permitting plant roots to go further into the ground for available nutrients.
• Elevated beds should have slat bottoms with space between the slats for drainage.

Soil for raised garden beds

One of the benefits of raised bed gardening is drainage, but this feature also makes the soil requirements of your garden box a little different. The real key is the compost. No matter how great your topsoil is, your beds will fail without compost.

• A good homemade soil blend is half topsoil made of healthy loam and half compost.
• A premium soil blend is equal parts peat moss, vermiculite and compost.