Benefits Of Raised Beds

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.

If you like the content I put out, feel free to buy us a coffee! It helps keep this site running, marketing and the goats in grain!

Buy me a coffee