~Written by Nan Sterman

Imagine this: a vegetable garden that produces a huge amount of food in a small space, takes a minimum amount of water, requires very little maintenance, and brings the plants to you, rather than you having to bed down all the way to the ground.

Sound impossible?  Not at all if you garden in raised beds. 

Raised beds are like giant, bottomless planter boxes filled with your favorite soil mixture.  The best beds are four feet wide – about right for an adult to reach the middle.  If you garden with children, 3 ½ feet better suits their shorter arms. 

Bed length makes no difference, though the longer a bed, the more efficient use of space. 

When my now teenage children were small, they each had their own four by four raised bed separated by a three-foot wide walkway.  Three feet accommodates most wheelbarrows (and wheelchairs).  Through childhood, they grew whatever they wanted in those boxes.  One year, my son planted everything purple – eggplants, asters, purple sugar cane, purple leaf lettuce. 

The plants didn’t matter, as long as they were purple. 

Eventually, their interest in the garden waned, so we replaced the two little beds with one big bed, the length of the two beds plus the walkway.  My new bed was eleven feet long and a more efficient use of the space.  

Bed height is important.  I’ve seen four inches tall beds, but I prefer them 18 to 24 inches tall with a 2” x 4” wood cap to sit on and set my tools on as I work.  If you garden from a wheelchair, you might want something even taller.

While my beds are made of long-lasting redwood, in the school garden I manage, our beds are composite lumber made from recycled soda bottles and ground wooden palettes.  They look just like wood but they will last absolutely forever.  And we really liked the idea of using a recycled material.

Raised beds can be made of other materials as well; stone, rock, bricks, blocks, logs, broken concrete.  If your budget is small, make temporary beds from 25-foot long straw-filled mesh wattle. Irrigation and landscape supply stores sell them for less than $30 each.

Coil the wattle into a circle or, if the circle is too large, coil it into a two-tiered circle. Fill with soil and start planting.  The wattle will last for about a year, depending on your climate.  

If you garden in gopher-ville or battle other root-loving critters, line the bottom of your beds with galvanized hardware cloth.  The tiny mesh protects delicate root crowns from gnawing teeth, but doesn’t prevent fine roots from growing deep into the soil.

Have your irrigation in place before you set raised beds in the ground.  Use drip irrigation to target water directly onto plants.  Drip is far thriftier than overhead spray. It also keeps water off plant leaves where it can cause fungal diseases like powdery mildew.

Finally, fill beds with a soil mixture that is at least 30% organic matter.  Skip the potting soil, it is great for pots but not for raised beds. 

Add soil to within about four inches of the lip, then top with a two-inch thick layer of Black Gold Earth Worm Castings Blend and a healthy sprinkle of Black Gold Tomato and Vegetable Fertilizer. Use a hand trowel or small spade to turn the amendments into the soil. 

After you plant, continue to apply Black Gold Tomato and Vegetable Fertilizer throughout the growing season.  Annual vegetables, fruits, edible flowers, and herbs are all hungry feeders. 

So, for the biggest most beautiful plants and produce, don’t forget the fertilizer. Organic fertilizers and amendments are always better for your plants and your soil than synthetic products.

Mulch your raised beds with old straw and you’ll soon have a wonderful harvest. 
Every year, refresh the soil in your raised beds by adding a thick layer of an organic compost such as Black Gold Soil Conditioner or Black Gold Garden Compost.

Enjoy!

About Nan Sterman

I am delighted to be contributing to Sungro’s website! Writing about plants and gardens, talking about them, teaching about them, creating gardens are my absolutely most favorite things to do. Fortunately for me, that’s my profession!

I grew up gardening. Among my earliest memories is the sweet scent of sweet pea flowers that surrounded my childhood home in Los Angeles. Equally memorable was the musty tomato forest my grandfather planted each spring behind the garage. As a college student in the 1970s, I was in the first wave of the sustainability movement that arose from the birth of Earthday. That was the first world-wide wake-up call about the limits of our natural resources.

Outdoors, I was in charge of the edible landscape, the vegetable garden, the chickens, rabbits, and compost. Many lessons from those days became permanent features in my life. I’ve made a vegetable garden in every place I’ve lived. I composting and recycle everything. I am notoriously frugal when it comes to using energy and even more so about water. In fact, my specialty is low water gardens, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

After my botany degree, I earned a Masters in marine biology at UC Santa Barbara and another in educational design at San Diego State University. For a decade I worked as an education and training consultant for companies like Union Bank and Century 21 Real Estate and organizations like the San Diego Zoo and Scripps Aquarium. In the early dot.com years, I designed educational software.

When I started testing the first generation of garden design software, the editor of National Gardening Magazine (yes, it was a magazine once) invited me to write up my findings. Soon, I was garden editor of San Diego Home/Garden Lifestyles Magazine. It was the end of one career and the beginning of the next. Today, I write for Sunset, the Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union Tribune, Organic Gardening, and etc.

My first solo book, California Gardener’s Guide vII was published in 2007 and in early 2010, Waterwise Plants for Southwest Gardens will be released. I have a TV show called A Growing Passion and am a regular guest on the morning talk show on San Diego’s Public Radio station. I speak, teach, and lecture to garden clubs and at garden shows from Albuquerque to Seattle, though most of my work is in Southern California. At the same time, I consult with water districts, public agencies, and the Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College in southeast San Diego County.

While many people promote low water gardening as a way to save water, I take a broader perspective. Low water plants are sustainable plants. Why? In addition to being low water, they need little if any fertilizers and have few pests so they don’t need to be sprayed or treated. Because they grow slowly, they seldom need pruning. Therefore, they contribute very little to the mountains of yard waste that are trucked and processed with fossil fuels while releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. How much “greener” can you get?

Somewhere along the way, I started designing gardens. I love to dig in other people’s dirt! My own garden is “slightly controlled chaos.” My 2/3-acre property includes beds of gorgeous perennials, shrubs, trees, and succulents, all adapted to growing with little water. I have a large vegetable garden, more than 20 fruiting trees and shrubs, an herb garden (couldn’t live without fresh herbs!) a brand new meadow, and a corner devoted entirely to California natives.

My goal with this column is to write about things that interest you. Please, email me your questions, comments, and photos of your garden. Let’s see what we can discover about gardening, together!

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