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Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening
There are several advantages in that you eliminate much of the need for bending over while cultivating and/or harvesting. The higher you build your bed, the easier it is to work and this can be a serious consideration for gardeners with special needs.
Water
Having said the above the higher you build your bed, the more water problems youre going to have. The bed will dry out faster than a normal in-ground bed because the water level is above ground. Gravity sucks! And it will suck the water out of that bed surprisingly quickly. Do plan on having a soaker system or sprinkler system and evaluate the water needs of the plants closely. Water management in the number one problem with raised bed vegetable gardening.
Soils
Raised beds can make it easier to work the soil and create super soils. As you construct your bed, you can add significant amounts of peat and compost to the soils to create a super-soil in that bed. Ive always liked adding one shovel of peat and one shovel of compost to every three shovels of soil when making raised beds or double-digging. This tends to open up the soil and create a well-aerated soil for gardening.
The disadvantage of high raised bed vegetable gardening is that the soil will tend to act like a large container more than an in-ground garden. This means that compaction can become a serious issue (use drip irrigation to lessen this problem) as well as soil quality. The higher soil temperatures in raised beds (those sides give the sun a place to shine and heat up) will give you an earlier crop but that heat will also tend to increase the rate of organic matter decomposition. Your compost and organic matter will not last as long in your raised bed vegetable garden as they will in a traditional garden.
It is a good idea to work peat moss and compost into that soil every year. For reasons that are beyond the scope of a simple article like this, plants in containers tend to grow better when the soil is more acidic than they prefer in traditional ground systems. So adding extra peat is acceptable. (In other words, the petunia in a hanging basket grows better if the soil is more acidic. In the ground, the same petunia doesnt like that acidity. As I said, it has to do with soil chemistry, heat and a bunch of other variables).
Fertility
Youll have to plan on feeding your plants a booster shot of nitrogen at least monthly in raised bed vegetable gardening. The extra water youre applying to keep the soil moist is driving the nitrogen down and out of the bed. If you want your plants to continue developing, youll have to add more readily available nitrogen (I like fish emulsion) from the top on a regular basis.
Plants
The very good news is that if you pay attention to the variables above you can grow any vegetable in a raised bed that you can grow in the ground. You can even intensify the planting a little (crowd them) if you pay attention to pruning and ensuring there is enough air circulation.
Construction
Any system that works for you and is within your budget and design thoughts will work. Ive used concrete blocks, rock, railroad ties, cedar planks, pine planks (didnt last long) and pressure-treated lumber to make my raised beds over the years.
It really doesnt matter what you use to make the bed it is the soil you put in it and how you modify it that will make or break your raised bed vegetable gardening efforts.
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