Raised bed garden design starts with a simple garden bed. The picture below shows my latest garden bed at the beginning stages so you can see it all clearly.
This kind of garden bed is ideal for renters or urban folk with lots of concrete and little actual soil for gardening.
The raised bed is constructed of 2 lengths of 2×10 spruce measuring 8 feet long each. Cut in half I now have 4 x 4-foot lengths to screw together to form a square. Note the use of screws so the box can be taken apart easily and quickly.
This square sits directly on a concrete patio slab and is filled with soilless soil mix (in this case, Promix) and then topped off with a layer of (optional) bark mulch.
I have roughly 9-inches of soilless soil mix covered with an attractive wood mulch.
We grew several tomato plants (staked up) a few hot peppers, some flowers trailing around the edges, herbs, and enough lettuce and spinach to feed us almost all summer long.
Kinds of Plants to Grow
Note this was all annual plants so the mulch isn’t critical at all. Growing perennial flowers may be a bit trickier because of the lack of soil. The soil in this bed will freeze solid over the winter and if that soil temperature gets to 5F, then death is assured for a significant number of perennials. Tough plants such as Iris and Hemerocallis would be good bets if you want to start growing perennials in a raised bed design such as this.
Moving?
The advantage of a garden bed design such as this is that the plants can be dug up, the soil removed and bagged for moving, the 12 screws holding it together removed and the entire garden can be moved and then reassembled quite easily.
The entire garden fits into the trunk of a small car.
Note – ignore the clay pots behind the bed. I tend to assemble and plant everything on this concrete slab to make cleanup easier. This raised bed stayed in one place this past summer and is still there for next year’s garden.
So there you are – a movable example of raise bed garden design. 🙂