What to Ask Yourself Before Building a Raised Bed Garden
Raised bed kitchen gardens are wonderful for growing food, unwinding after a long day, and gathering with family & friends. But what makes them so great? And how do you do it? Where do you even start? At Noble Root, we get these questions all the time, and we want you to know that you’ve come to the right place!
In this article:
Why raised bed gardens are awesome for growing food
Designing raised bed gardens for beauty and function
How to maximize your harvests by “growing up”
The ONE thing to do if you do nothing else in your garden
It’s not too late to start!
Raised bed kitchen gardens are for everyone
Raised bed kitchen gardens are meant to be beautiful and functional. When built correctly, they can take the hard work out of gardening – making it easier to plant, maintain, and harvest produce without breaking your back. Ideally, kitchen gardens are designed to encourage regular visits so you can pick fresh ingredients and prepare meals straight from the garden.
But first, why build a kitchen garden in the first place? Because there are countless benefits to growing food at home! Here are just a few:
Reduce your carbon footprint
Keep harmful pesticides out of your body, home and the environment
Improve your nutrition!
Enjoy time spent outdoors
Save water
De-stress in your own private sanctuary
Provide critical habitat for pollinators
Strengthen neighborhood resilience
Raised bed kitchen gardens can also provide homeowners with a longer growing season, up to 9 months in the Pacific Northwest. Because garden boxes are above ground, they are not as vulnerable to hard freezes. The soil warms up faster and helps plants grow longer than plants in the ground. As an added bonus, it takes very little effort to hoop-and-cover your gardens at the very beginning and tail end of the growing season, extending your harvests even further.
Raised beds also tend to have fewer issues with weeds, snails, and slugs because you’re able to control more of the environment—in a good way—from soil blend, to pathways, to irrigation and drainage, to weed control. Quite simply, there are fewer opportunities for those pesky little plant killers to infiltrate your greens.
This list could go on and on! Raised bed kitchen gardens are awesome. But they can also feel intimidating to someone brand new. It must be a lot of work to design and build them, right?
(Not really! You just have to know the right questions to ask…)
Where should I start?
Your garden is an extension of your living space, a reflection of who you are, and a complement to how you live. So one of the first questions we like to ask is, “how do you plan to use your kitchen garden space?”
Do you spend a lot of time in your garden, or do you squeeze in gardening time around other hobbies and activities? It’s best to choose a garden size that can be maintained within your lifestyle.
Do you have kids and pets who also share your backyard space? Think about the entire use of space, including open areas.
Are you an experienced gardener or rather new to it? Don’t be afraid to start small and build on as your confidence grows.
How you live in your day-to-day life will help inform the design of your garden space. For example, a retired couple who entertains regularly will likely have different needs from a young family with a dog or two. The garden boxes, pathways, materials used, and the plants themselves will vary depending on how you live and what your goals are.
Since there’s not a “one size fits all” solution to designing your raised bed kitchen garden, ask yourself these questions:
How can I maximize sun exposure for each raised bed?
How close is my kitchen to the garden beds? Is it in view?
How much time do I want to spend in the garden?
How are people going to move through the garden? What about pets?
What’s my design style and how will this garden tie into the rest of my home?
What is my budget?
Materials in the garden
There is a wide variety of materials to choose from for raised beds, pathways, and trellises depending on your style and budget. These are important decisions because they help create the overall look and feel of your garden. The use of wood, stone, or metals creates vastly different “looks” in the garden. On the ground, whether you lay down low-maintenance gravel, natural stones, wood chips, or pavers will also affect the overall look, feel, and accessibility of your kitchen garden.
Sometimes forgotten in garden design, trellis structures are a vital element in the kitchen garden. Functionally they provide a climbing structure for plants which allows for increased airflow, pollinators to access the blooms, abundant sunlight to flow in, and reduced exposure to fungal diseases. Aesthetically, they add visual appeal and year-round interest to the garden. Homeowners can choose from various shapes, materials and structures to fit the look they’re going for, such as obelisk structures, arches, A-frames, and panels.
Here are some edible plants that like to grow vertically:
Cucumbers
Tomatoes
Pole beans & peas
Melons
Small squash and pumpkins
“Growing up” in your garden will help maximize your garden’s space, beauty, and crop yield. A raised bed kitchen garden design wouldn’t be complete without some sort of trellis, so don’t skip this important structure.
The magic happens after taking all these different aspects into consideration. The primary goal for every project is to create a design that is both BEAUTIFUL and BOUNTIFUL.
What are you waiting for?
If designing your raised bed kitchen garden seems daunting, tap into these resources to help you plan and build the kitchen garden of your dreams. Here are five things you can do today to start, or give a boost to, your raised bed kitchen garden:
Analyze your yard and garden space. How do you use your space now? What are your goals?
If your existing garden isn’t producing as well as you’d like, consider your sunlight! Most plants will do really well with 6+ hours of sunlight a day. Greens do well with 4-6 hours of sunlight per day. You might need to trim trees, move planters, or otherwise make adjustments for your plants to be happy.
Improve your soil. Do not EVER put native soil (aka clay soil) in raised beds. If you did, replace it with premium blend soil appropriate for growing food. This one single change will have an immediate positive impact on your plants by giving them the right blend of nutrients and drainage properties. Then apply a 1-2” layer of compost during every seasonal rotation.
Start out small and build confidence in the garden. If you’re a beginning gardener, edible herbs and salad greens are a GREAT place to start!
Book a consult. We LOVE helping homeowners dream about what’s possible and then build it. If you think it’s too late to get started this season, think again. It’s literally NEVER too late to get started in the garden. There’s something new and ready to plant almost every month.
By building raised beds that blend style and function, you can create a beautiful space with the ideal growing conditions for frequent and regular harvests. Unfortunately, many raised bed gardens look like an afterthought because they probably were installed as an afterthought. That’s why Noble Root is on a mission to help homeowners build the kitchen garden of their dreams.
Sign up for the monthly Noble Root e-Newsletter! Next month, we’ll take a deeper dive into plants, what to plant, and when to plant them in the Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA metro areas.
About:
Nicole Spencer is the founder and Principal Garden Consultant for Noble Root. She is a Gardenary-certified Garden Consultant, Kitchen Garden Coach, and Licensed Landscape Contractor specializing in raised bed edible gardens and backyard habitats. Her passion is helping clients transform their backyards into healthy, thriving, and productive oases that benefit people and pollinators in Portland-metro and Vancouver, Washington areas.
