Leigh

Oh, I love my raised beds. Let me count the ways! While it’s not a total love affair, it’s pretty close. In my 15 years of gardening, I’ve head a lot of different types of gardens. Container gardens when we lived in an apartment. In ground when we moved to the second military house. Raised beds in a couple different houses. And finally, a ton of raised beds in our forever home. But don’t get it wrong, I still have in ground spaces, but I greatly prefer my raised beds. The benefits of raised beds cannot be overlooked and I’m going to tell you al about them.

Benefits Of Raised Beds

We all know the cons of raised beds. Mostly, that they can be really expensive to fill. I talked about raised beds vs row gardens here if you are interested in that. I also listed ways to fill raised beds for cheap here. But today, I want to talk about all the benefits of raised beds and how I converted my “row gardens are the only way to garden” hubbins into loving raised beds too.

Weeds

Depending on how you filled your raised bed, you will have little to no weeds. Now, we live in Georgia and have monster weeds. So we will always have some form of weeds to contend with, but for the most part, we don’t have to weed as much as with regular gardens.

A huge part of that is the fact that we just add mulch whenever we find a bunch of weeds. This helps the build the soil but also squash those weeds!

Depending on the height of your beds, and if you laid down some sort of barrier between your bed and the ground, you may never have to deal with weeds. On some of our beds, we laid down woven ground cover like this, to help suppress the weeds. While it works, I don’t love having a barrier between the ground and the bed. As weird as it sounds, I’d rather have the weeds than plastics in my soil. But to each their own. You do what works best for you!

Height

Having some height to the garden has been a back saver! I’ve got a “bad” back. I’ve got scoliosis and for the most part struggle with sitting, standing, or walking for long periods. So being on my hands and knees weeding the garden or even harvesting is really difficult for me.

I’ve got 2 different height beds, 1 foot in the kitchen garden and 2 foot in the big garden. I haven’t decided which one I like better. The shorter beds make it a lot easier to reach into the beds and I can kneel on the edges. But the 2 foot beds means that I can lean my thighs on the beds.

Either way, I’m not on my hands and knees trying to get into the beds.

Plus, it is much easier to find issues and harvest veggies when I can actually see them!

Containment

Another thing that I absolutely love about my raised beds is containment! Every spring, we have torrential downpours. To the point were it’s difficult to get off our gravel road. The first few garden seasons, we had an in ground (or row garden) and when I tell you that we lost a TON of soil, I’m not joking. It didn’t matter what we did, all the work we did that previous year to build the soil was toast.

Because we have raised beds, our soil stays put in the bed.

Another reason why raised beds are great for containment is because the plants, mostly, stay put. Yes, come August, the entire garden is overflowing it’s space. But for the most part, the plants stay within their designated areas. This makes mowing that area much easier.

Lastly, when we are buttoning up our gardens for the winter, we can chop and drop straight onto our beds without worrying as much about the wind, rain or animals spreading all that organic matter around. The bed keeps everything in the bed.

Animals

This one is a multifaceted benefit. We allow our animals to go into the gardens in between seasons. For example; August is an in between month. Most of our garden is toast due to high heat and low rain. So we allow our chickens to go into the beds and eat whatever we didn’t get to harvest.

But raised beds also create a barrier between the animals and our food. We can actually see the animals getting into the beds, so that helps to keep them out of it when we don’t want them in the beds.

Also, we have systems that allow us to place chickens into specific beds. We’ve got a couple tractors that we can put right over the top of our beds. It allows the chickens to be kept in that bed and “force” them to dig through it and eat all those bugs, eggs and larvae. This has single handedly reduced our hornworm, army worm, and Japanese beetle populations.

Water

I left water for last because it’s going to take several minutes cover all the perks and benefits of raised beds. In fact, I could probably write an entire blog post about the benefits of raised beds and water conservation. But I’ll behave myself and just give you the “quick” answer.

This past summer, we had almost 2 months of zero rain. Like we didn’t even have dew in the mornings, zero rain. My plants had very little issues in regards to water loss. Sure, we had some scorching from direct sun, because full sun in south is totally different than full sun in other parts of the country. But it wasn’t until about week 6 that we needed to start watering our gardens!

The reason is because we have raised beds.

We dug down about halfway (about a foot for the big beds and about 8inches for the smaller beds) down the beds and found that the dirt was still damp and cool. Most of these beds didn’t even have mulch on top of the soil!

The water retention of raised beds can’t be overlooked.

Two years ago, when I asked Jared to build me my kitchen garden raised beds, he was wholly and completely against the idea of raised beds. In fact, I had to incentivize him to build my kitchen garden beds. But after he saw the soil go from crappy top soil and goat bedding to rich, dark, light and fluffy soil? He was more okay with building me the raised beds in the big garden.

He absolutely disagreed. He didn’t think it was necessary. It was a waste of money and time….

Until we had a 2 month drought. All his buddies that had in ground gardens were telling him that their gardens were toast. Ours were still going strong. His buddies gardens were all drying out and the soil cracking. Ours? Still damp and cool.

Sure, we had to water about 6 weeks into the drought, but it was only the hottest beds that are in direct sun. Everything else was still going great. Once we started getting rain, our beds didn’t flood out like his buddies in ground gardens. Our beds retained all the water they got.

Benefits of Raised Beds

So while there is a TON of expense that goes into raised beds, for us it has been worth it. We had our best garden yet due to these raised beds. Yes, each bed costs about $500 between materials, labor and soil. But that is a one time expense, at least until the bed needs to be replaced. It retains water to the point where I don’t have to worry about watering the garden in peak summer? Sold.

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As we head into fall garden season, I got to thinking about all the things I needed to do before I plant my first fall garden seed. As I was chopping and dropping spent plants, I realized that most gardening content is geared towards planting, but there wasn’t much about when or how to prepare your gardens. So here is what we do to prepare our gardens for planting as well as how to prepare them for winter.

When To Prepare Your Gardens

There is no perfect time to prepare your gardens for planting, mainly because you will be preparing your gardens several times throughout the year. Sometimes, I don’t use a bed for a season. Other times, it’s a quick dump of goat bedding in a bed and move along with my plans. And sometimes, I just plant the bed without doing barely any prep work. But I wanted to talk to you about how I usually prepare my garden beds for planting or putting them to bed for winter. I also wanted to talk to you about how I START my beds just in case you are brand new to gardening and don’t know where to start.

What Does Preparing Mean

Let’s talk first about what preparing your garden means. For me, prepping beds could range from filling with soil to adding organic matter or even just doing a chop and drop. But prepping beds always starts with an idea of what is going to happen with that bed within the current or next several seasons.

Having a plan for what that bed will look like in the coming season will tell you how you should prepare it. To give you some examples, I have a couple beds that I am going to allow to overwinter with nothing in them. I will throw a bunch of leaves over the top of the bed and call it good. If I am planning on using that bed, I will clean out the goat barn and add all that amazing goat bedding as organic matter AND fertilizer. It really depends on what I am doing with that bed.

But I have a plan, even if it’s just a loose guess of what I want to do with the bed.

Preparing Your Gardens: Brand New Gardens

When you are starting a brand new space, you may have some questions about how to get started. This is really going to depend on if you are building raised beds or row gardens. Because I prefer raised beds, I don’t do much before I start planting except building and filling beds.

This year, we installed 12 4ft x 20ft raised beds in our big garden. It was a HUGE undertaking. But one of the things that we did was loaded the bottoms of each bed with logs, branches, leaves, etc. The reason we did this was several parts. First, I can’t afford to fill each bed with 6 cubic yards of soil (that’s about 215 bags of soil). Second, by loading the bottom half of the bed with brown matter (tree parts), it gives the organisms in the soil something to eat. Third, and possibly most important, by loading the bottom with tree parts, it reduces weeds!

However, because I am not going to use my raised beds for things like corn, potatoes, etc. I still need a place to plant those things. For these spaces, I will pick a spot, dump a ton of goat bedding on it and then till it under. While I don’t like tilling the soil, I live in Georgia where our soil is clay. So doing a no till isn’t ideal, at least at first.

After a season or two, I don’t need to till to break up the soil anymore. But it can be tricky to figure out when you’ve reached the point of not needing to till anymore. The other thing that I will do to keep weeds down in the off season is either plant cover crops or tarping. This is going to look different for everyone, but tarping allows you to kill weeds by blocking out all light to the soil. I use these from Bootstrap Farmer. You can plant cover crops and then tarp them about 2 months before needing to use that space. That’s usually enough time to kill the plant and start the composting cycle.

Preparing Your Gardens: Established Space

Again, this is going to look different for various reasons. If you are doing row gardens, raised beds, planning to do a fall garden or just summer gardens, it will all require different things to prepare them. To keep this simple, I’m going to give you an overview.

When I am preparing raised beds for the next season (spring, summer, or fall), I will usually chop down whatever was growing and either give it to the chickens or goats or dump it into a bed that needs to be filled. Then dump a healthy amount of used goat bedding in the bed, water it, then in a day or so, plant the next round of vegetables.

If the bed isn’t going to be used that season, I will chop and drop whatever was growing. Chop and drop is exactly what it sounds like. Cut the plant at soil level and drop it in the bed. That’s it. Sometimes, I will add a healthy layer of mulch, leaves or other organic matter that will break down during that bed’s off season. This feeds the organisms in the soil and allows the soil to replenish itself.

If I am working on an area that is in ground and not being used for the following season, I will usually hit it with the weed eater. Then I will either use cover crops or tarp it, most of the time both depending on the timing. But if I plan on using that area for something like sugar beets in the fall or corn in the summer, and the soil is not yet light and fluffy, I will dump used goat bedding on it and then till it under. If the soil is light and fluffy, I will cover it with a tarp until the weeds are dead (again about 2 months), then I will drop seeds and cover with compost or goat bedding.

Overwintering Your Gardens

When your seasons are done, there are several things to keep in mind. First, you need to cover the soil. This could look like dropping a ton of leaves or mulch on the beds. It could look like cover crops. You just need something to cover the soil to prevent erosion, water loss, and weeds. You’ll also want something that will give back to your soil. I use this cover crop from True Leaf Market.

When we are done with our gardens, sometimes we will leave the plants in the ground. Yes, I have pulled out last years tomatoes out in February. For us, it’s not a big deal.

Also, if you plan on starting your own seeds, which I highly recommend, find your healthiest soil and pull several buckets of soil out of it. I use these totes from Home Depot. This allows me to use my own very healthy soil instead of having to purchase bagged soil.

Lastly, if you haven’t already, go here and grab a soil tester. I usually grab two, one for our kitchen garden and another for our big garden. This tells me how my soil is doing and what I need to add for the following year. But I’m going to be really honest with you, I didn’t add anything to the kitchen garden. The only thing I did, was what I do every year….add more goat bedding.

The two pictures below are from our 2024 test in the kitchen garden, test was taken in January of 2024. Not too shabby considering this is the first year of those garden beds and we only used cheap top soil from the gravel place down the road, used goat bedding and mulch from the local tree company.

Reoccurring Themes

If you have made it this far, you will notice that there is a reoccurring theme to my planting style. I have found over the years that I have a TON of goat bedding that needs a place to live. Especially at the end of winter. We use the deep litter method for our goats. This means that by the end of winter, I have about 30 bags worth of pine shavings, 4 months worth of poop and urine, that have been composting down in the barn. This is free organic matter, fertilizer and mulch!

Another theme that you have probably noticed is cover crops and tarping. Letting a garden plot go fallow is one of the worst things you can do to the soil. Fallow is basically ripping plants out of the soil and then not doing anything with it. The reason this is so bad is because your soil is going to run away with the water. All that hard work you did to get your soil fluffy, light and workable without having to till it, is gone. You’ve got to give the soil something to grab on to, like plants. This is going to help water retention, reduce loss of top soil, and keep the micro organisms in the soil happy. If your soil is happy, your plants will be very happy.

Lastly, I absolutely love my raised beds. It is the ultimate no till garden and I don’t have to worry about the soil, plants, or anything else going outside those beds. It’s contained and I love it. There are so many benefits to raised beds that I could go on and on… I even made a post about it! But don’t panic if you can’t do raised beds! I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it a million more. A home garden is the best garden. It doesn’t matter how you grow plants, as long as you are growing plants!

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