Garden Beds? Check! 🧑🏽🌾
As one of my resolutions this year, I decided to build some raised bed planters. After many moons, I’m happy to report the planters are officially built!
This project was definitely more involved than I first expected. I’ll try to share some of what I learned here in case it’s helpful to anyone else who’s unsure how to get started on their garden beds.
A Million Questions 🙋🏽♂️ ✖️ ♾️
Before picking up your hammer or clicking on a BUY button somewhere, try to capture as much detail as possible about your specific context. Here are some questions to help activate your little grey cells:
- What’s the purpose of your garden beds?
- What’s the right balance for you between different plant functions? E.g. ornamental, vegetable/herb, medicinal, environmental impacts, etc.
- What’s your budget?
- What species and varieties would you like to plant?
- How much time can you devote to building or setting up?
- How much space do you have to work with?
- How tall will your plants be?
- How much soil depth will your plants need?
- Will your plants shade each other?
- How much space will your plants need between them?
- How much direct light does the area get in a day?
- What are the temperature ranges in the space over the course of the day and over the growing season?
- How will water water get in (irrigation) and out (drainiage) of the planters?
- How will you access the innermost areas of the bed?
- What are your local zoning rules? Can you put garden beds anywhere? Do you need a permit?
- What materials do you think look good in your space?
These may be obvious to the seasoned gardener, but it took me some time to understand what questions even to ask. Of course, answers to one question will affect answers to another, so give yourself time to revisit and re-evaluate and revise your plan a few times.
At first, I was trying to choose based mainly on price, but I wasn’t really sure how to weigh the resulting tradeoffs. Only after the main questions were settled, i.e. plant varieties and budget in my case, did the other answers really start to come into place.
I hope to make this part of a series of posts and share more of what I learned. In the meantime…