How Raised Beds Make Gardening Less Pain and Strain! | Gardening

By TomJohnson
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Word Count: 420

Love to garden but finding that age is restricting your ability to manage your pride and joy as well as you did? As a baby boomer, I know how you feel. The knees and back don't recover from the bending like they used to, do they? What you need is some lateral thinking to allow you to keep gardening and I have the answer... raised beds.

To allow for easy reach you need to build your bed to about 2 feet high and 3 feet wide, this is easily done with a timber frame. This eliminates any kneeling and decreases bending for us as we get older, more importantly it also gives anyone confined to a wheelchair the opportunity to enjoy doing some of the light maintenance work in their garden.

What other benefits do you get from this form of gardening? Let's see... there's the removal of soil problems, greatly improved pest and weed control, the above mentioned ease of access and the increase in your crop harvest.

Your plant selection is increased, you can grow fruits, herbs, flowers as well as vegetables. In fact, anything that likes a well drained soil will thrive in a raised bed garden.

Your garden beds will need less water because you can plant your crops a lot closer together than you would normally. Then there's the added advantage of less weeds because of less room to grow and shady conditions.

Planting closer means larger crop yields, but raised beds will also give you the ability to start growing seeds outside earlier in the season and you'll enjoy a longer harvesting season. In simple terms, you'll get a larger crop from the area than you would normally expect.

If you have soil problems in your garden, you can use raised beds and just bypass your own soil completely. If you start with completely fresh soil, it doesn't matter what type of soil you had in your garden to begin with.

As a gardener, you'll also appreciate that you don't have to walk on your raised beds very often, so the soil isn't getting compacted like it normally would, this lets your plants develop stronger roots. Your plants will show their appreciation by producing a bigger, more luxurious crop.

Diseases and pests are easier to control in raised beds. Since you're starting with fresh soil, it's less likely to be contaminated with diseases that could infect your plants. If your plants do become infected, you can simple dispose of the soil in that bed and start again from scratch.

About the Author

Ready to load your small garden with plants and fragrance? Tom Johnson has a Free Report for you called Container Gardening Secrets.

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