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1) DRAINAGE!!! If, like us, you garden on the kind of clay that makes engineering bricks and is used to "puddle" ponds with, this is the main reason.

2) No soil compaction, you never walk on it so it stays friable.

3) Warms up much quicker than flat beds

4) Easy to cover quickly with fleece, clouches etc

5) Easier to weed, as you can sit on a stool or the edges if thick enough (the bed edges, not the gardener!)

6) Greater sense of achievement, even if you have ten beds & only weed one it looks SO much better!

7) Makes crop rotation easier, 'cos you know exactly where things were previously, (so long as you keep notes!)

8) You can grow crops closer than in the open ground. I have a purpose built "poly" greenhouse that sits over two beds & the middle path & it means even my indoor toms can join in the rotation.

9) Less weeds, cos the crops are closer.

10) Less ground to water.

11) Targeting compost, lime, feed etc is easier therefore you use less.

12) Easier to cover in summat to keep dark if you've nowt growing (!) & want to keep weeds out.

13) Easier to harvest, sitting again if you like!

I grew in open ground for several years then tried a couple of beds...now I have 28. I get upto 1/3 more food from the same piece of ground. The most often comment is that the paths (grass and bark chippings in my case) waste space, but I left "paths" between my open ground crops too, and they moved year-on-year leaving compacted soil that needed digging far more than my beds ever do. I am a total convert. If you garden on heavy soil I'd recommend them every time.

MW

You can make them look pretty

You can edge them with all those empty wine bottles

you can put a plastic sheet down first, adding gravel, then several inches of soil, if like i do, suffer from moles, coles, and mice

You can use them in a garden which is a rather poor attempt at something Zen-like (previous owner's idea) - all pebbles, rocks and pond. Move a couple of the big rocks out of the way, plonk the raised bed frame on top of the gravel, fill and hey presto - a veggie patch!

The first time I saw this I thought you meant sleeping beds and storeage underneath.

Just shows up in Preparation mode!

The kids don't run over the veg seedlings in it (although admitedly if running fast enough they can do a good job at tripping over the raised edge falling forward and flattening the majority of the patch - is it just our kids who are this clumsy?)

deeper soil in green house, also making it easier to water, less leakage everywere

jenko

They are fab if you moved into a house with no garden, only a covered yard....we took the roof off (I use we in the royal sense, actually a very nice builder named Mike did it!)....we also had shed-loads of concrete bricks that have holes in them (like two boxes without tops or bottoms joined together), so one plus one equals two etc etc....raised beds it is then!!!

No more digging!

Avoids having to bend over so much!

In our garden, DH lifted up the pavement stones in the driveway to the garage*. There was 30 cm of packed sand and gravel underneath... So used pavment stones to build raised beds. Drainage is a bit too good, even whenfilled with soil and compost, but otherwise really glad to have them.

(*Garage being located in such a way that we lost a staggering 30% of our garden to pavement if we wanted to park in the garage. Ha, bad luck for the car, which lives outside. The carport in fron of the garage door got ripped away and on the foundation now stands a greenhouse. The pavement cleverly converted to raised beds.)

Annemieke wrote:No more digging!

Hallelujah

Im a huge fan of raised beds and have several on my allotment.Used raised bed for years.3 years ago we were lucky to obtain an allotment on a new site.60 plots in all.We had also just recently moved house,and had removed our raised beds from the old house before moving.So on opening day,we took our raised beds to the lottie,laid them all down in position,lined them with newspaper,then over a week,filled each one with compost and top soil.After a week I had everything planted up.....however everyone else were on their plots,digging,sweating,working hard etc and we were sat in our deck chairs watching everyone!haha.....Three years later,70% of the lottie holders now have raised beds!lol My main reason for having them is ease of maintenance,very little weeding,and it keeps the slugs at bay.We've not found one slug on our whole allotment!

The only problem I am having... I have plenty of old fence posts/slats that I want to use for another couple of raised beds. I now need a decent saw to cut up the posts. I only have a crappy hack saw, and I can see myself struggling with that. (Have done smaller stuff with it in the past.) So I've been procrastinating for weeks to get it done - meanwhile, I have nowhere to plant my veg, and am (mentally) kicking myself in the behind for being such a lazy bugger...

Some of our raised beds are made out of pallet wood. It doesn't last more than a few years but we're able to replace odd bits, as needed, without needing to demolish the entire thing.

This is the new plot we made when we realised the dome wouldn't fit.