Raised Beds for a Vegetable Garden
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- May
- 9
Here’s our latest Ask the Master Gardeners column, courtesy of Cornell Cooperative Extension:
Q: I’m interested in creating raised vegetable beds to compensate for not only poor soil but also my aching back. What building materials are safe to use in raised organic vegetable gardens?
A: Raised vegetable gardens are a great way to get delicious home-grown veggies without the worries of seasonal flooding, poor soil and drainage — and you may even even avoid damage from those cute little gophers with voracious appetites.
These gardens can take advantage of the most favorable location, and unwanted pests will have difficulty penetrating through the chicken coop wire on the base of the planter. Finally, with a cap seat around the perimeter of the raised garden, aches and back pain will be a thing of the past.
The best material to use is natural wood, not pressure-treated varieties. Treated lumber is chemically preserved to prevent it from rotting; yet those chemicals can possibly leach into the soil posing an unhealthy situation for the gardener.
Rather, use redwood, cedar or Douglas fir to create the raised beds. If redwood is too pricey, cedar is more affordable. It is rot resistant for at least 10 years even with direct contact on the ground. In time the wood will age and take on a silvery gray sheen.
You can purchase PVC raised bed kits that are moisture and temperature resistant. This light-weight material is quite strong and will last many years. But a cheaper method of planting with plastic materials is to create a container garden using some of those detergent buckets, plastic cat litter containers or even the discarded black planting pots from the nursery.
Wash all the containers thoroughly and make holes in the bottom of the buckets for drainage. If aesthetics are an issue, build wood frames to surround groups of these containers. Not only will these plastic containers function as raised vegetable gardens but they also will aid recycling efforts.
— Vivienne Dieckmann, Sloatsburg-based master gardener, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Rockland County
This entry was posted
on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 3:38 pm by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
I have tried the PVC kits and they work great.