Raised bed essentials
Location is key to a good yield of crops, as low light levels will limit which crops you can grow. I make sure that my raised beds are somewhere that will get roughly six to eight hours of good sunlight most days. Watch where the light falls in your garden and then check that the area you choose will also get enough rain.
If you place the bed under a tree or next to a fence, you’ll restrict the amount of rain reaching it, we call these rain shadow areas. Obviously, the more rain your plot gets, the less watering you’ll need to do. Feeding the soil will mean you can grow a lot of plants close together without them competing for nutrients. I top mine up with manure or soil improver each year, and will add liquid feed to give hungry veg like tomatoes a boost.
■ Don’t walk on your raised bed to prevent compaction. Growing taller plants in the middle and tumbling veg at the edges will help you easily reach them.
■ Mulch with well-rotted manure in mid-summer to prevent plants drying out. Raised beds drain quicker than ground-level soil.
■ Keep soil topped up as you pull out plants to prevent the level of your bed dropping as you keep harvesting crops.
■ Cover with cloches or fleece early in the year and you’ll be able to start sowing earlier, resulting in earlier harvests.
■ Build more beds, if you have space, so you can rotate your crops more easily and help reduce a build-up of pests and disease.
Raised beds hold moisture for a lot longer than a pot or container due to the larger quantity of soil