How to make a raised vegetable garden is a how to guide that will help all raised bed gardeners. When you survey your back yard, you may realize that there are too many rocks or the good soil is absent or maybe you just find it too hard to dig deep enough to plant a vegetable garden. Whatever the reason, there is a workable solution. That solution is a raised vegetable garden.

Once you have made your first raised garden and you see how simple it was to create, you will wonder why you hesitated. The look of a raised bed is so clean and the problem of weeds is so much less, it is worth the effort you are going to expend. Not only will you have fewer weeds, but also you will not be bending over as far to weed your garden and pick your vegetables when they are ready for harvesting.

The convenience and ease of pulling the vegetables is one reason that raised gardens have really begun to grow in popularity. The soil can be fed with compost before you even start adding in your soil. Compost is the natural method for feeding the planting soil. When you have a raised garden, you add all the soil in after it is constructed and so mixing in fertilizer and compost will produce better soil, which will yield a bigger harvest of healthier vegetables.

Before you start to build or make any physical changes to the yard, you should watch how the sunlight hits the area. You are looking for an area that has up to six hours of direct sunlight.

Once you find that location then take out a sketchpad and begin to sketch out the desired placement of your plants. This will help you keep from making classic mistakes like placing tall plants in front of ground cover type plants. Choosing the perfect placement of the vegetables will assure that they all receive the correct amount of sunlight.

Each seed packet or sprout should have instructions telling you how deeply to bury the roots or seed and how high the plant is expected to grow. By using this information, you can design the plants placement and choose the locations that will allow them to thrive.

Once you know how large an area you have to work in and have a drawing of the types of plants that you will be planting and a rough draft of how they will be placed in this raised garden, you will be ready to research sizes of the garden framework.

When you decide to have a raised garden, you can purchase the kits either online or in the home and garden centers like Home Depot or Lowes. There are now raised garden kits made from wood as well as plastic, which bolt or snap together.

If you are handy and love that sense of accomplishment, then you can build your own. If you decide to build your own then you can visit the How To Build A Raised Garden Bed page. The raised gardens on that page take less than a day to complete and then you will be ready to prepare the soil.

When planning the raised garden, remember that some of the tubers will need deeper soil than plants that grow on the top of the ground. With using a 1"x12"x12' board you will have plenty of depth for those roots.

If you decided to go with the limb edged garden that is featured on the building a raised garden page, then your soil will be less deep and you may be more limited by the choices you can grow, unless you decide to take the dirt to a 12 inch level.

When planting Tomato plants you bury much of their stem into the ground to give them a really well supported root system, so again the deeper soil level will accommodate them better. Once you have made the decision on materials and size you are ready to begin your project.

The Planter is built and the choices of the vegetables have been made. You are almost ready to purchase and plant.

First, it is time to prepare the soil for planting. With the Frame laid, a layer of weed resistant cloth should be placed over the ground. Then it is time for the soil and a fertilizer that is high in phosphorous to be mixed. If you have compost then it is time to add that into your planting soil so that it provides a healthy base for all your seeds and seedlings. You will be adding in enough soil, compost, and fertilizer to fill a 12x3x12 box.

This should take about 4 bags of compost and fertilizer to make the soil a nice mix for the vegetables. If you wanted to wait about two weeks before planting, then you can use manure as a fertilizer. You can choose this step if the planting season is still several weeks out.

Once the mixture has been placed into the planting box, it is time for placement of the plants. Following your sketch, you can start placing the seeds and seedlings the correct distance from each other as stated on the planting instructions. Digging each area and planting all of the like plants at one time. Then moving over to the next section, you will plant the next vegetable and this will continue until you have the garden just as you planned.