> Next: Building a Cold Frame
Beds for Growing Vegetables
Prepare to plant a home vegetable garden in your yard either directly into the garden’s soil or in defined beds by allocating space for each vegetable:
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- In-ground, on-ground beds, or raised beds?
- Spring and autumn season extenders: What, How, and Why?
- Modifying a slope or hillside’s terrain to grow vegetables.
- Soil preparation basics.
Bed Decision Basics
Vegetable beds fit both large and small home landscapes, so explore all your options for building on-ground and raised planting beds for your seeds and transplants. Well-planned and planted vegetable garden beds will produce all the vegetables, fruit, and berries needed to feed a family.
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If you live in a region with a short gardening season, consider a cold frame to extend your season in the spring and in the autumn. Cold frames are simple in-ground, covered planting boxes with removable or opening glass tops.
They’re a perfect place to move indoor starts out into the garden in early spring. Opening their top during the day when air temperatures are warm and closing it at night during cold snaps protects tender seedlings and transplants. In winter the cold frame becomes a growing box for tender leafy greens that need protection from early frosts.
When it comes to larger outdoor beds the choices are on-ground and raised beds. Similar in principle, use on-ground beds primarily in sites where soils are fertile and well-textured. They require bending and stooping, however. If you want to avoid strenuous exercise, or if your site’s soil is unfit for planting a successful garden, consider building raised beds and filling them to seating height with great soil.
Raised-box beds are also the right choice on sloping lots, making a hill-fitting vegetable garden. They’re the alternative to fully terracing the hillside to create in-ground planting beds. In either case, they raise the soil level on the downslope side to a comfortable working height and stop erosion from carrying away your soil and plants.
Pre-Planting Preparation
Once you’ve picked the type of beds you want for your garden, prepare your soil for planting and amend or add fertilizer into it. Remove any rocks and other debris, rake the site level and smooth, and build rows, furrows, hills, mounds, and moats where you’ll plant.
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On-ground beds in low areas may have soil drainage problems, so moat around them and provide a path for excess water to leave the planting area. The soil in raised beds and on terraced slopes is high above any surface water, but good drains are still essential in some sites.
Preparing soil begins with double-digging the bed to incorporate air, amendments and fertilizers into the top 12 inches (30 cm) of the bed’s soil. Once you finish that task, allow the bed to settle for a day or two and then rake it smooth, removing rocks and debris, breaking up clods, and preparing the soil as a level place to receive vegetable seeds and starts.
Prepare planting beds by furrowing the bed into rows, raising mounds and hills, or hoeing in irrigation furrows and moats. Then, follow the seed sowing and seedling transplanting steps provided to plant your garden.
In-Ground, On-Ground and Raised Beds
Where soils are poor or a tidy look is the goal, on-ground framed beds and raised-bed gardens provide easy answers.
These boxes perform several important and useful functions:
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- They allow amended, rich soil to be brought to the site and used for growing, overcoming most native soil issues.
- Because they are raised, they help avoid standing water or drainage issues common in many gardens.
- They provide easier access to growing vegetables for planting, care, and harvesting, without stooping and bending.
- They can provide terraces on slopes and hillsides too steep for planting.
In this section, you’ll find easy-to-follow demonstrations of how to build two kinds of beds for growing vegetables.
In-Ground Garden Beds
On-Ground Beds of Dimensioned Lumber
Raised Beds of Structural Timbers
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