There has always been one kind of a garden or another here at the Cottage. We liked the idea of the ease of care and wanted to work smarter at our gardening and weeding while replacing what we are buying at the grocery store with what we could plant and eat at home. We tossed around different garden designs for a while before we decided on a raised bed garden design.
The History of the Victory Garden
These gardens started during World War II. The government approached the public with the plea to begin a garden in their own backyard to help with the war effort. People that were self-reliant were not dependent on the government to care for them jumped on the bandwagon.
People were urged to take care of themselves and to do their patriotic duty “Victory Gardens” began to spring up all over our nation. Popular magazines of the day like the “Saturday Evening Post” and “Life” printed stories about them. Women’s magazines gave instructions on how to grow and preserve garden produce as a result of this there was a rage in the purchasing of canning equipment across the U.S. Americans purchased 249,000 more pressure canners in the year 1944 than they did the year before.
They were serious about their gardens. The USDA estimated that there were 20 million Victory gardens planted here in America. Now that is a lot of produce! Fruit and Vegetables harvested in these home and community gardens were estimated to be 10 million tons of food. Even if you don’t think that you have the time, you have a less than a green thumb, you CAN do this. Let us help you with great ideas for your own raised bed garden.
Why Use Raised Bed Garden
A raised bed garden is a GREAT option for people with:
a) very little time.
b) poor soil.
c) less than a green thumb.
We chose to do a raised beds garden in our yard this year. Weeding took up so much time with our normal 2700 square foot garden and we girls were working till we dropped. This year we decided to try this.
Weeding A Raised Bed Garden
The weeds were controlled for the most part by the shade cloth that we used for under these boxes and the trellis kept it all up off of the ground. As a result, we have a large garden area that is pretty simple for us to have control of. You could further add a drip watering system to reduce the time you have to care for the garden too (we don’t go into that here). Read on and see how simple these beautiful raised bed gardens are to make to begin your garden and take a step toward food independence (besides, there is nothing like a little dirt to make you feel good).
Raised Bed Garden Layout
- Companion Planting Part 1
- Herbs To Plant That Repel Bugs
- Doing Companion Planting Part 2
- Companion Planting Part 3
- Flowers That Repel Bugs
How To Build A Raised Bed Garden
- 2x12x8 untreated lumber
- decking screws
- heavy duty metal staples to hammer into the wood to attach the cattle panels.
- Electric Drill
- Shade Cloth
- Staple Gun
- Staples (to attach shade cloth to the bottom of the box)
- Cattle Panels
Preparing The Lumber For Your Raised Bed Garden
Raised Bed Garden Soil
- DIY Tomato Cages
- How To Transplant Seedlings
- Starting Seeds
- How to plant and plan a fall garden
- What to plant in the fall
- How to plan a garden in 4 easy steps
