Im a big fan of raised beds, you can bring in the ideal soil/aggregate conditions to grow the full range of vegetables which might be very difficult to do if you are relying on the soil that you inherit. The other benefits include not compacting the soil by not walking over them. You should make the width of your raised beds such a distance so that you can reach the centre comfortably from either side without having to climb into them to do so. Industrious people have suggested a width of four feet is ideal. They can also save a huge amount of effort by addopting the no dig approach. If you add clean topsoil, compost and possibly vermiculite then the properties of your soild be be a rich, water retentive, stone free medium. You may have to do the odd bit of weeding from the odd weed seed that is present in the upper layers of the medium. But once you have dealt with those you should keep well on top of infestations that can occur everytime you dig your soil over on a traditional level soil approach. Raised beds also have the added advantage of warming your medium faster which means that you can often steal a few extra weeks at the beginning and end of each season. The final biggy is that you can do away with rows and follow an instensive planting approach such as square foot gardening which I will cover in more detail another time.
The downside to raised beds are that the medium can dry out a lot faster because the drainage is much better than traditional method's. However watering efforts can still be managable by applying a decent mulch whilst sufficient moisture is trapped in the medium and you add water retaining houmous/compost and or vermiculite each season to assist in reducing the amount that you would need to water your beds.
The other is the initial cost of the project. I had gone down to the local wood merchents and nearly gave up on the whole idea of raised bed gardening altogether when I was quoted several hundred pounds for the timbers, then there was the paving which would have cost another twelve hundred and the local garden centres charge about seven pounds for a hundred litres of compost which would had set me back a small fortune considering I estimated That I would need in the region of twenty two tonnes of compost/topsoil to do the job properly.
So I tried other means and couldnt beleive my luck when I won all the paving I needed for just sixty pounds on ebay. I also found a local salvage firm who sold me over six hundred feet of only slightly used scaffolding for just two hundred pounds. Finally after contacting a company that made their own compost in Bedford they kindly put me in touch with our local commercial composting initiative who we able to offer topsoil/compost mixed to any cocktail and gradient for fifteen pounds a tonne. I also had to buy a few tonnes of builders sand to lay the paving on. All in all I have spent less than seven hundred pounds to get hold of all the materials for this project which
There was a lot of "dead space" that was taken up with pea shingled paths that I thought to myself I really didn't need. The paths here are one and a half feet (forty five centimetres). Enough to get a barrow down and comfortable single file up and down.
The raised beds are four and a half feet wide by fifty two feet. Thats a lot of ground to plant up.
Hoping to grub out the remaining beech hedges and get the rhubarb in before the ground freezes up. I dont usually feel the cold but boy its brass monkeys out side for the moment and it looks like we are due a three week snap.
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