Creating raised garden beds is a wonderful way to get a garden started easily. When you plant your flowers or vegetables in raised garden beds, you don't have to pull weeds first, turn soil, or dig out a lot of rocks and other debris. Instead, you simply choose the location you want your garden bed to be, lay down your bed retainer walls, and fill it with dirt.

Raised garden beds are popular because they're easy, but also because they allow you to start growing seeds and small starter plants earlier in the season. A raised garden bed will become warmer earlier in the season than a ground based garden bed, and that allows you to start your gardening earlier in the year.

The first step to creating your raised garden bed is to choose the materials you'll use for the walls of the bed. There are a wide variety of materials that can be used to create your garden bed. Rocks for instance, can be piled together into a rock wall design. Bricks can also be used to create a more formal looking garden bed too. Wood or railroad ties are easy, attractive and sometimes even free too.

Regardless of what you choose to create your garden bed with, you'll need to gather enough materials to make the bed as high as you'd like it. Some people like to create garden beds just a foot or two tall, while others create tiered garden beds which have multiple levels ranging from a foot or two in height, to four or five feet at the tallest level. How you design yours is completely up to you of course, and your budget.

Once you've decided on the materials you'll use to create your raised garden bed, the next step is to choose the location for the bed. Where you place your garden bed will depend on how much space you need, and how much sunlight you'll need too. If you're building a raised garden bed to plant a vegetable garden for instance, you'll want to place the bed in a location which gets at least five to six hours of sunlight each day.

Now that you have your materials and location chosen, it's time to build the bed. And all you need to do is simply lay out your material in the design you want for the garden bed to create the bed frame. Once the frame for your garden bed is ready, then you just need to fill it with soil. Put enough soil into the new garden bed to bring it to at least one or two inches below the top of your garden bed frame.

All that's left now is planting. You can plant small starter seedling plants in your bed, sow seeds directly, or put more mature plants in, whichever you prefer. After planting your plants in the new garden bed, surround them with some type of mulch material such as tree bark or dry grass clippings, so the plants and bed won't dry out too quickly during hot spells.

Tags: Flowers, Raised garden beds, Vegetables

Many new gardeners don't often understand how important it is to use mulch around the base of their flowers, plants, shrubs and trees. It doesn't matter what kind of gardening you're doing though: flower garden, vegetable gardening, container gardening, or planting bushes and trees, putting mulch around your garden beds will help you in a number of ways.

1. Mulching your garden plants and flowers will help you conserve water. By covering the ground around your bushes, flowers, trees and other garden spots, you're able to help protect your plants from the strong, hot sunlight of summertime, and this helps keep the soil around them moist for longer periods of time.

2. Weed control. Putting mulch around your plants and flower beds also helps prevent weeds from growing and invading your flower beds. Since mulch serves to keep the sun from reaching the soil around the base of your flowers, weeds will have a much more difficult time growing there. And the few hardy ones that do sprout up will be much easier to see and remove.

3. Cold protection. Mulch is extremly important and useful in areas which freeze each winter season. It's particularly important to place a thick layer of mulch around the base of tropical plants when you live in an area that freezes each winter. If you have a thick enough layer of mulch, you can often prevent your tropical plants from freezing and dying due to the cold weather.

Many types of mulch also just add another layer of beauty and sophistication to your garden beds too.

There are a wide variety of materials which can be used for mulching your garden. An excellent organic material is wood chips, shavings, or bark. Since wood is an organic material, it will slowly break down and be mixed into your garden soil, providing more vitamins and nutrients for future years.

Grass clippings or dried leaves which fall from your trees each fall are also excellent natural materials to use for mulching your plants and flowers, as is straw and hay. Since these are also organic materials, they will contribute to the overall richness and fertility of your soil as they breakdown too.

Some people prefer to use mulch materials which will last for many more years at a time though, and some popular ones include plastic, and rubber material made from recycled tires. These often come in the form of circular rings for placing under trees and bushes easily.

Rocks and pebbles can act as a mulch too though, because covering the bare soil around your flowers and plants with pebbles or rocks serves the same purpose: Retaining moisture and preventing weed growth. Traditionally though, most mulch was designed to both protect the plants and flowers while feeding and enriching the soil too.

Tags: Garden mulch, Gardening

Planting a home vegetable garden is a wonderful way to provide your family with fresh healthy produce throughout the year. Even though the vegetables in your garden will be ripe for just a short period of time during the year, you can take the extras and put them into your freezer, or can them up in jars to put into the pantry, and both will be useable by your family throughout most of the entire year.

Planting your own vegetable garden also allows you to know more about how healthy or dangerous the foods you're eating are. Store bought produce for instance, is often grown on farms which use chemical fertilizers and poisonous pest control methods. Plants absorb whatever is put onto them or into their soil as they're growing, so if you're eating produce which has had chemicals and toxins used on it, those chemicals are also in the plant itself, and are being fed to your body.

When you grow your own vegetables in a home garden though, you can choose to use organic growing methods which are much safer for both the environment, you, and your family.

Growing a vegetable garden starts with planning. You'll need to decide first what vegetables you plan to grow in your garden. If this is the first time you're growing a vegetable garden, try to start small so you can get a feel for how much of each thing is needed as you become more experienced. A nice way to get started with your first vegetable garden is to select three to five of your families favorite vegetables, and plant just those the first season.

Next you'll need to decide where you'll place your vegetable garden. You'll need both plenty of space and plenty of sunlight to grow vegetables. Vegetables need at least five to six hours of full sunlight each day, so figure out where in your yard that much sun is available, then see if there is enough room there for the number of vegetables you intend to grow. If your vegetable garden will be small, you can probably choose a planting location which is only about three to four feet square.

Once you have your location chosen, it's now time to prepare the soil for your vegetable garden. You can create raised garden beds to plant your vegetables in if you'd like, and this will make preparation and care easier. If you're planting in the ground though, you'll need to turn the soil, remove all weeds, roots and large rocks, then mix some healthy compost into the soil so your vegetables will have the nutrition they need while growing.

After preparing the soil, you'll need to make planting rows, or long mounds of soil, to plant your vegetables in. These rows should run east to west so they'll get the best sun and water exposure. When you start planting seeds or starter plants, be sure to put those that will grow the tallest at the north side of your lot, so they won't shade the smaller plants too much during the day. The smallest plants should go on the south side of your vegetable garden plot, and progressively taller ones should be planted across.

Tags: Peppers, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening