Southwest Florida Gardening

A raised bed garden is essentially another form of container garden… except that it’s more or less bottomless and a lot bigger.

Start by choosing the proper location for your raised bed garden. You want an absolute minimum of 6 hours of full sun per day. You need access with a water hose that isn’t going to destroy other landscaping or plantings in the area. You also need to be able to get to the chosen site with a wagon, garden cart or other such device for carrying in any heavy bags of dirt, fertilizer or additives.

If you’re in SW Florida, it might be a good idea to add to the list of criteria a bit of shade, preferably filtered shade, to protect your plants from the full force of our sub-tropical sun.

Size matters. You want the bed to be long and narrow. No negotiation on this, unless you’re planning on making small square gardens. The reason is that you want to be able to reach to the center of the bed comfortably, without straining. Because of this, a bed that is four feet wide is usually best. Length isn’t so important, but I generally try to make my raised bed gardens eight feet long, simply because that’s a standard size at the lumber yard and is easy to fit into my car. One raised bed would require three pieces of eight foot long wood, one of which gets cut in half.

The depth is pretty much a matter of what you like. Unless you’re planning to grow extra long carrots or those Oriental radishes, you don’t need anything super deep. My beds are 10 inches deep but I have also made them with six inch wood when that’s what’s available.

Whatever depth you choose to make your raised bed garden, be very sure to avoid pressure treated wood. The chemicals used to protect the wood will leach into the soil in the bed and thus into your crops. 

I like 10 inches simply because I can sit on a low stool to do my gardening without having to bend over so much.

Now we come to the part that can be controversial.

My first raised beds since moving here were made with wood pulled out of a horse barn. I didn’t need horse stalls, but I needed open space for my goats, so the wood from the stalls was recycled. I ended up with beds that were three feet wide by 6 feet long. I nailed the boards together to form a rectangle and set the bottomless boxes directly on the ground.

Next, I put down a good layer of newspaper (not the glossy magazine pages!) to block the weeds, then a layer of well rotted horse manure, topped off with purchased top soil. The beds looked beautiful. And they were a total disaster.

Purchased top soil, no matter how good it looks, doesn’t seem to hold moisture well. No matter how hard I worked at watering the beds, I simply couldn’t get the moisture to “stick”.

Eventually, I spread out a tarp, dug out all that lovely purchased top soil and mixed it with plain old peat moss. Then I put it back into the raised bed and put a soaker hose down the center. That worked. The peat moss absorbed and stored the moisture and my garden did well.