Get Rid of Your Gardening Aches and Pains With Raised Beds!
Tom Johnson
Love to garden but finding that age is restricting your ability to manage your pride and joy as well as you did? As a baby boomer, I know how you feel. The knees and back don't recover from the bending like they used to, do they? What you need is some lateral thinking to allow you to keep gardening and I have the answer... raised beds.
To allow for easy reach you need to build your bed to about 2 feet high and 3 feet wide, this is easily done with a timber frame. This eliminates any kneeling and decreases bending for us as we get older, more importantly it also gives anyone confined to a wheelchair the opportunity to enjoy doing some of the light maintenance work in their garden.
There are lots of other benefits to having raised beds other than easy access. For instance your yield of vegetables can be greatly improved, weeds are less and the few you might get are easier to manage, pest control is also much easier and any problems you might have with your soil are eliminated.
You're not restricted to just growing vegetables of course, you can grow just about anything in your raised beds. There's different types of fruit, the huge variety of herbs and the even larger number of flowers. Any plant that needs a well drained soil is a candidate for your new garden.
The plants in raised bed gardening are planted much closer together than the plants in a traditional garden. This allows the plants to conserve moisture and also help block the sun from allowing weeds to germinate and grow.
Planting closer means larger crop yields, but raised beds will also give you the ability to start growing seeds outside earlier in the season and you'll enjoy a longer harvesting season. In simple terms, you'll get a larger crop from the area than you would normally expect.
You'll be able to use rich, well composted soil in your raised beds, so any type of soil problems you've had in your garden become a thing of the past. This way of gardening allows you to overcome any shortcomings you have in your soil.
Another reason your plants will grow larger and produce more is because the soil they're growing in is loose and friable. This is largely due to the fact that no-one has to walk on your garden beds and compress the soil, this allows for better root growth.
Since you'll be filling your raised beds with good fresh soil, the odds of infecting your plants with any disease is far less and pests are much easier to manage in a limited area. Again this adds to the overall increase in your harvest and the quality of your crops.
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