Perhaps the easiest way to get an organic garden up and running is to use a raised bed approach. Raised bed gardening is pretty straightforward… it involves dropping a thick, rectangular frame onto the ground, laying in fresh soil, planting seeds and away you go!
While it’s not much more complicated than that, there are a few steps to make sure your raised bed garden is a success.
For instance, while most people use old railway ties to create their structure, you should take some caution because you don’t want to have any toxic chemicals leeching into your soil. Same for a lot of treated wood that you find at hardware stores. One sign that wood has been treated is that you’ll see hash marks about the size of a staple, in a definitive pattern through the wood. So it’s a good idea to check with your hardware sales person to find out if the wood you’re buying has been treated, if you want to insure no toxic chemicals reach the soil.
Next is a somewhat obvious thing — good soil and organic fertilizer. Healthy food comes from healthy soil, so we suggest you check out GeoLife for their fantastic organic fertilizer products.
Making Raised Bed Gardening Even Easier
One simple way of taking the stress out of maintaining your raised bed garden is with an automated drip system
You could even take this another step farther and hook it up to a rain cache system (which is essentially a big vessel that stores rain water from your gutters). This means you can lower your water bill and have an even more sustainable system in place!
While I’m not a big fan of using plastic products in organic gardening, it’s an obvious time-saver. Purists might chew you out, but as far as I’m concerned, anyone that is growing food on their own deserves credit for their efforts!
“Really High” Raised Bed Gardening
This method kind of caught me by surprise when I first saw it, but its a great option for people that have back issues and can’t bend over to take care of weeds and harvest their luscious veggies — it’s the waist high raised bed garden system!
It looks just like it sounds — raising the garden to standing level so it’s super easy to maintain. Of course I think it’s more fun to get down on my hands and knees and really connect to the earth, but I do a lot of yoga so my back doesn’t give me a lot of trouble. But if potential back pain is a concern, check out that guide for tips on how to get it set up.
