Home Gardener’s No-Dig Raised Bed Gardens(Fox Chapel Publishing, 2016) by A&G Bridgewater is an essential guide to creating low-maintenance gardens without hours of digging and weeding. Great for beginner or experienced gardeners looking for an easy, no-nonsense gardening method to fit a busy schedule.
What is the best material for raised beds?
Raised beds are essential in this system because they define and separate the growing and walking areas, and enable the gardener to control the quality of the growing medium by layering up organic matter within the beds. The height of the beds can also be modified to increase or decrease the depth of the growing medium, as required for different crops. The beds can be made from a variety of different materials.
The Possibilities
Although there are many options – you could build raised beds in metal, wood, plastic, brick, stone, woven willow, straw bales, old tires or whatever else you can find (some of these are easier on the eye than others) – the two key thoughts here are that the structure of the beds should be long-lasting, and the design should be adaptable so that the beds can be stacked and/or moved. Woven willow looks good, but it is fragile and not easily adapted. Brick beds, on the other hand, certainly look good and they are long-lasting, but they are so fixed in form that they cannot be modified. While large tires last forever and they can be stacked, they fail because the cavities hold too much water and give home to pests such as ants and mice. Look at the materials available in your area, and design the beds accordingly.
The slideshow will show you that there are indeed many possibilities, but you still must be mindful that if you really want to get the best out of a no-dig raised bed garden – maximum crops for minimum effort – then function is all-important. For this reason, a pattern of stackable wooden raised beds, with the addition of recycled trash cans and builders’ waste bags to be used as fill-in standbys, works extremely well. For example, if you decide to trial a new crop in a little-used marginal area of your plot, you could use a mix of waste bags and salvaged metal trash cans before going to the effort and expense of building a more permanent wooden bed.
Reprinted with permission from Home Gardener’s No-Dig Raised Bed Gardensby A&G Bridgewater and published by Fox Chapel Publishing, 2016.
