Gardening is indeed good for body and soul, but it can be awfully hard on the back and the knees. Enter raised garden bed ideas: a wonderful gardening option that makes it easier for everyone to embrace the pleasures of gardening.
Not only is raised bed gardening easier physically, but the beds can also be a beautiful design element in your landscape. Rows of raised beds are formal and orderly, and the paths between them present an opportunity to add additional decorative materials to your yard. Scroll through our favorite raised garden bed ideas and find the inspiration to create your own raised bed garden design today.
See more about - 69 Garden Decor Ideas
Table of Contents
1. Raised Garden Bed Ideas Against Walls
If your home has a sunny wall out back, placing your raised garden against it is a good idea. Some mid-century homes included this style of built-in planter box. If you’re lucky enough to have one—and it gets enough sunlight—this is an ideal place to locate your garden bed. If not, it’s fairly simple to build a DIY raised garden bed along a garden wall or fence.
Cinder blocks, stacked stones, bricks, and recycled wood are all excellent materials for creating raised garden beds along a wall. Keep your garden bed around 24″ deep, so it’s easy to reach all the way to the back. An ideal depth for a raised bedgarden is 12 to 24 inches. If you’re growing climbing or flowering vines, be sure to hang a trellis behind the garden bed so the vines have something to grab onto.
2. Farm-Friendly Concepts
Raised bed gardening is perfect for today’s small backyard farms. Instead of classic rows of vegetable varieties planted directly in-ground beds, raised garden boxes house each type of vegetable. These neat raised garden bed grids are easier to navigate and manage than old-style vegetable garden rows.
If your backyard farm includes animals, raised garden boxes can protect your valuable edible plants from becoming a snack. Protect your vegetable or herb garden from birds, rabbits, raccoons, and other wild animals with wire caging or a removable pest gate. These structures protect your plants when you’re not around, but you can remove them easily to tend to your backyard farm garden.
3. Effortless Inspirations
One of the easiest ways to get started in raised bed gardening is to purchase a complete garden bed kit. You can assemble these prefabricated raised garden beds quickly. If you cannot find a prefab garden bed, consider using galvanized stock tanks instead. These also add a fun farmhouse vibe to your landscape.
You can also make a raised bed garden by stacking cinder or concrete blocks into short walls. You can finish this simple raised bed design option in a day. Plus, it’s inexpensive. Use them for growing food, but reserve at least one for use as a flower bed if you enjoy freshly cut flowers. Or plant flowers into the openings on each cinder block to encircle your vegetable garden with a flowering border.
4. Charming Enclosed Designs
An enclosed raised garden bed is one that has a wire enclosure around its top. This type of garden box is helpful if there are a lot of pests where you live. The enclosure is usually a wooden frame with chicken wire or another type of wire panel. This type of garden enclosure allows you to protect your precious produce, herbs, or flowers.
Your garden enclosure may be as tall as a room or much shorter. Some small bed garden boxes have hinged tops that you can lock at night and open whenever you need to pull weeds or pick produce.
5. Elevate Your Garden With Raised Flower Beds
A raised flower bed adds so much beauty to your yard, whether front, back, or side. You can buy garden planters in a huge variety of shapes, colors, and sizes. Set them alone to showcase a mixed container garden, or group them for a lovely overall garden design.
Formal and informal flower garden design works with raised bed gardening. Wildflower groupings can look as though they transpired completely naturally, providing an informal garden feel. You can achieve formality by layering tall, medium, short, and trailing plants to make a florist-like arrangement. Be sure to use soil types specifically created for growing plants with flowers.
6. Landscape Enhancements
Raised garden beds can fit nicely into any landscape. If you love the look of baskets, make your raised bed gardens from woven wattle. You can make this attractive raised garden bed idea from twigs woven in a basket-weave pattern. Their circular shape adds beauty to the landscape, and you can use teepee trellises to support climbing plants.
Add creativity to your garden plan by alternating the materials you use to create each garden bed. For example, place a round galvanized container garden between two wooden garden boxes. Make a wooden bed garden from recycled redwood, repurposed wood pallets, or treated lumber designed for that purpose. Refrain from using recycled railroad ties, as they can leach harmful chemicals into your soil.
7. Thoughtful Garden Layouts
The way you lay out your raised bed garden design will depend on your yard’s size and how much sunlight your plants will need. A bed garden may be one small container, or your garden design may include multiple planter options arranged throughout your yard. Keep the size of your gardening zone in proportion to the size of your house and yard.
Don’t be afraid to get creative with your raised planter and garden design. Arrange pie-shaped elevated gardenbed structuresaround a center sculpture or fountain. Visually soften the edges of your growing area by laying grass-covered paths between garden boxes. If you’d rather not mow grass paths, cover the ground with landscape fabric and top it with a thick layer of beautiful gravel or mulch.
See more about - 85 Vertical Garden Ideas
Metal is a popular choice for raised planter design, especially for those who enjoy farmhouse style. Galvanized stock tanks are one of the easiest metal-raised garden bed options. If those are too big for your yard, look for smaller metal or metal-and-wood options. A small kitchen garden can grow on a patio by filling a galvanized tub with compost.
Make a wooden planter frame, then fill each side with corrugated metal panels for a modern metal and wood combination. Metal garden edging is easy to install and perfect for retaining shorter, curved gardening beds. Note that the one downside to including metal in your planter or edging design is that it can rust over time. If that happens, your garden may not look as neat as you wish, although some people prefer the look of a rusty patina.
9. Adaptable Sloped and Multilevel Garden Beds
A multilevel or sloped yard requires a raised garden bed planter design that adapts to the landscape. Multilevel bed garden ideas include arranging planters in a stair-step design, with taller plants on the higher levels and shorter ones below.
The soil itself within a large raised bed can slope to fit the natural curves of the ground beneath. Square foot gardeningcan work well along a slope landscape, with each 4×4 planter stacked in slightly overlapping rows.
10. Space-Savvy Options
In some ways, a small raised garden bed is the easiest bed to manage. Although your vegetable harvest may not be large, it’s easier to fill up smaller raised vegetable beds. A smaller bed garden also has fewer weeds, making daily maintenance a faster proposition.
Small raised garden boxes are also more economical than a series of large raised garden beds. A keyhole garden has a shape like a pie with a wedge cut out, or a boxy U-shaped structure. These small raised garden beds can hold a surprisingly large number of plants.
11. Healthy Harvests
Vegetables tend to do very well in raised bed gardens because it’s easy to create the perfect soil type. Also, the beds warm up faster in the spring, which can extend your growing season. Growing vegetables with edible roots, such as carrots and beets, in a raised bed garden makes harvest time easier.
A raised bed vegetable garden benefits from a drip irrigation system, especially during the hot summer months. Low-flow irrigation systems such as micro-sprinklers or a soaker hose network are easy to regulate and they’re unlikely to overwater your soil.
12. Stylish Elevated Garden Beds With Legs
If your soil is overly wet, you’ll want to build a raised garden bed with legs to avoid ground moisture from ruining your soil integrity entirely. Having space between the planter and the ground will help you regulate the moisture levels correctly and ensure that your beds have adequate drainage.
Garden beds on legs can be large or small, and you can adjust them to make gardening easy for your height. You can also find a garden box designed with an open shelf beneath the planting area.
13. Vertical Appeal of Trellises
If you want to plant climbing roses, green beans, morning glory, or other climbing vines, you will need a trellis in your raised garden bed. A trellis can be a classic, grid-shaped structure between the raised bed and a wall or fence. Or a trellis can be a teepee-like structure made of poles radiating from the edges of a circular planter, meeting at the top.
Climbing plants add visual interest to your raised bed garden, whether you use them for growing flowers or vegetables. Create a natural barrier between two garden boxes by placing a trellis between them. Within months, your vines will grow to create a green wall between the two areas.
14. Natural Beauty of Wood
Raised garden pallet beds made from reclaimed wood pallets add a rustic vibe that is welcome in many home gardens. You can paint, stain, or leave your wood bare, depending on the look you’re after. Use extra wood to make a rim wide enough to sit on while tending your plants. Some wooden raised bed plans include instructions to build a seat on one or more sides.
Wood beds do require a bit more maintenance than some other options, but you can also add onto them easily if you want to expand or create a deeper bed.
See more about - 83 Patio Garden Ideas
Raised Garden Bed FAQ
What do I put on the bottom of a raised garden bed?
Because good drainage is essential in a raised garden bed, use organic materials for your base layer. Old, dry wood is a great base layer that will decompose underneath the soil. Grass clippings and dry leaves are other good choices. Cardboard also makes an effective weed barrier. Avoid using rocks, as they create an artificial water table that impedes drainage.
How deep should a raised bed garden be?
Raised gardens do not have to be deep. Usually, eight to 12 inches is adequate. Vegetable beds may go deeper, from 12 to 18 inches deep. Build up the height with organic materials, leaving space for the right amount of soil.
How many tomato plants can I fit into a 4-foot by 4-foot raised garden bed?
Five is a good number. Place one plant near each corner and one in the middle. It will look like you have room for more, but crowded tomato plants suffer from stunted growth. Remember that your adult plants will be much larger than your seedlings. Leave plenty of room for plants to grow and produce fruit.
