Garden Design Tips & Tricks
When planning your raised bed vegetable garden layout, the types of vegetables, watering needs and sun play a big role.
The best advice I've learned about garden planning is to group your vegetables and herbs together that have similar watering and light needs. Generally, when we envision raised bed vegetable garden ideas, we may be tempted to place vegetables where we think they will look best or fit best, but experienced gardeners plan their gardens in early spring for a good reason. Let's get into all the things to consider before building and laying your beds.
1. Choose plants that make good roommates
Part of the reason pros plan so much time is that there are such things as incompatible plants—their moon signs are polar opposites and you definitely shouldn't ask them to share an apartment. Have you ever had a toxic roommate? Some vegetables are considered allelopathic, meaning they may have toxic behaviors or even chemicals that harm plants, such as tomatoes, beans, beets, broccoli, cabbage, peas, and soybeans.
According to many gardeners, does not get along with others. For example, dill and carrots, cabbage and strawberries, mint and asparagus, potatoes and tomatoes, or peppers and beans.
Some great pairings include tomatoes with basil, corn and green beans, carrots and onions, spinach and onions, and carrots and leeks. These pairings have advantages such as improving the soil, improving the growing environment, or keeping specific bugs away. I recommend looking more into companion planting when planning your raised bed vegetable garden layout.
2. Group plants with similar light requirements
Keeping all of the above in mind, arrange your sun-soaking plants together and your shade-loving plants together. Or, use your sun-loving plants to shade their fair-skinned friends.
With enough foresight, you can also get creative by planting companion plants together. For example, if you plant carrots behind tomatoes, the tomatoes will shade the light for the shade-loving carrots. Corn and green beans, which have similar light requirements, thrive together because the beans can allow the corn stalks to be used as trellis stalks, while the beans also improve the soil for the corn.
3. Group plants that like/dislike water
This is very important, as well as grouping vegetables together with similar soils. Again, keeping in mind the worst roommate scenarios above, I like to organize my raised bed vegetable garden system to water one area at a time. I was really lucky that the house I bought had a built-in sprinkler system, and I was able to do long and short watering for different areas, but I could do it with a hose.
As I enjoy manually watering my garden, it helps to separate the Pisces from the Aries in the garden so that everyone gets the water they want.
4. Watch your back
If you hate bending over to pick weeds in your garden, you're not alone. When thinking about your raised bed vegetable garden layout, think about how high you want your beds to be.
A good friend of mine who is almost three months pregnant recently had her husband build some waist-high garden beds for her so she could still enjoy gardening without bending over and it made me wish I had a full waist-high garden myself! My body may argue that I could use exercise, but it sure feels good, right?
5. Give yourself room
The benefits of building raised beds are mostly for comfort. Less bend to weeds, more organized vegetation and space to move between your plants. The best raised bed vegetable garden system usually has at least a 2- to 3-foot-wide path between boxes, which allows you to bend down, harvest, and weed easily. Many gardeners prefer a stone or sand path, which is easy to maintain without using any chemicals to get rid of weeds.
However, if you don't have the space or budget for it, in between Easy to do with an in-ground lawn, just leave enough room to maneuver your lawnmower. If grass clippings are left untreated, they actually make excellent mulch.
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