Landscape Your Yard with Raised Bed Gardening

Few gardening practices offer you more benefits than choosing a raised garden bed as one of your primary landscaping techniques. From a practical standpoint, you’ll have healthier plants and easier landscaping to maintain. And from an aesthetic point of view, by being creative about the materials you build raised beds out of and where you put them, you’ll add beauty, form, and texture to your overall landscaping vision.

Raised Beds Mean Healthier Plants

Perhaps the biggest payoff of raised bed style gardens is the improved health of your plants. Because a raised garden bed drains better, is filled with better soil, is easier to maintain, and generally attracts fewer weeds and insects, you can be sure your plants will be healthier and more productive. It’s the reason raised beds are so popular when it comes to vegetable gardens. By simply switching to raised bed plots, a gardener can see veggie yields improve by twice as much. The good news is that those stats don’t just go for tomatoes and squash. Raised bed gardening in landscaping means you’ll have twice the flowers come spring and summer, and that other shrubs and landscaping plants will flourish as well.

Raised Beds Make for Easy Maintenance

A raised garden bed also make for easier landscaping maintenance. Because raised beds are more defined and set off from the rest of your landscaping, they have less trouble with weeds and insects. And because they are “raised” off the ground, dealing with the few weeds or bugs that do show up where they don’t belong is a lot easier. In fact, raised bed gardening can be a godsend to those with back trouble, physical disabilities, or those of us whose joints just aren’t as limber as they used to be. A raised garden bed can be built as high off the ground as you like, accommodating backyard gardeners who wouldn’t otherwise be able.

Raised Beds Everywhere!

If you’re like most homeowners, you might have some doubts about what a raised garden bed can offer when it comes to developing an attractive landscape design. After all, a raised bed garden usually means an ugly square veggie plot set off in the back corner of the lot, right? Wrong. Raised bed gardening makes for beautiful landscaping around the base of trees, around porches and decks, as terracing on slopes, and to add form and texture to otherwise featureless landscapes. In fact, a raised garden will look great just about anywhere you can think to put a traditional style garden bed.

Material Is Everything

When it comes to raised bed gardens, using the right material to build them can make or break the design. That square plot in the back corner of the yard looks so drab because it’s usually made out of old scrap lumber, or an equally unimpressive material. Fortunately raised landscaping can be built out of stone, decorative concrete blocks, brick, landscaping timbers (railroad ties), and just about anything else you can imagine. And by using materials consisting of multiple interlocking or stacked units (i.e. cut stone or concrete blocks), it means raised beds can circle around trees, curve along fence lines, and even rise and fall with the landscape. If you’ve got a vision, there’s a landscaper out there who can mold raised garden beds to match.

When it comes to landscape design, raised bed gardening is tough to rival. In order to make the most of these innovating landscaping solutions, talk to a landscaping professional about helping you put together and install your new landscape plan. From choosing building materials to picking and installing your plants, their expertise can help you get your raised bed garden landscaping project up and running.

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