• Higher yield
• Creates a micro-climate in which weed growth is suppressed
• Moisture is conserved
• Extends the growing season
• Plants grow easier due to loose soil
• Easy on your back due to tall building height

Below you’ll find examples of raised bed designs:

A circular raised bed made from round pressure-treated wooden poles:

Photo by Karen Blakeman. (Barracks Lane Community Garden, Oxford, England, GB).

I think rounds beds are definitely the most beautiful, but also least efficient when it comes to yield, because you waste grow space in the ‘corners that are not there’, compared to rectangular beds.

There may be a health issue when using pressure-treated wood – take a look at this post for more info: Raised Garden Bed Plans

If the poles have the same length below ground as above ground they are be able to support themselves, held in place by the weight and pressure from the soil.

The next two photos show lots of ordinary raised beds but they are special because they are built on the property of an elementary school:

Photo by Billie Greenwood. (Casa Alegre, Santa Fe, NM, US).

Photo by Billie Greenwood. (Casa Alegre, Santa Fe, NM, US).

I haven’t seen anything like that in my country, and certainly not a kitchen garden of this size (although I’m wondering what the grass like plants are, but I’m pretty sure I see lettuce in one of the beds).

Working with raised beds in school is a great way to teach kids about food and energy, and certainly an improvement from my time in school, where the teaching was limited to cress growing in a windowsill

I’m not sure if the next one qualifies as a raised bed:

Photo by R Berteig. (Monrovista, Monrovia, CA, US).

I guess it depends on whether you took the few steps down into the middle or you’re standing on the normal ground level.

I’ve seen this type of bed used beneath a greenhouse, where the greenhouse is placed on top of the outer wall, although this was in a smaller scale. It probably has to do with the building height of a greenhouse, to be able to get more headroom when working inside, so you lower the “floor”.

Raised beds made out of concrete and stone will last a lifetime, so make sure you get the design right the first time, or be prepared to bring in the heavy machines to clean up any mistakes.

This is the basic raised bed as mentioned by John Seymour in his book about self-sufficiency:

Photo by Trees For The Future. (Cameroon).

On average your soil should be warmer since it’s raised above ground (although cold soil shouldn’t be a problem in Cameroon…)

While taking care not to walk on the raised bed soil the members of the Njimacob farming group are building a support to create shade against the burning sun (about 1,000 km / 620 miles from the equator).

The planks in these raised beds look like they are made out of expensive, long lasting wood, because of the dark color:

Photo by Poppet with a Camera.

A more dark type of wood is probably going to last longer that a light colored type. If it has been treated with oil for preservation it will also be darker, and last longer.

If you want low maintenance aisles between your raised beds you can lay out sheets of plastic for weed suppression between the beds as show in the picture above. I find an aisle width of 50 cm / 20 inches to be sufficient.

I like how tall this next one is:

Photo by Mike McCune.

This is actually the minimum height every raised bed should have in order to be easy accessible. The challenge is to find enough extra soil to be able to fill it up, but you’ll get fantastic root crops with this height. You can also place a raised bed with this much soil in it on a hard surface like concrete tiles, since the plants already got the room they need and don’t need to dig further into the ground.

The above one looks like it has been painted which will make it last longer. Just make sure the paint is environmentally friendly.

You don’t even need mortar to build a raised bed from stones, if you use strip stones that fit together very well:

Photo by Jay@MorphoLA.

This is one of the most robust raised beds I’ve seen – made of bricks and mortar which means it will last a lifetime – or four:

Photo by Choking Sun.

It has a good height too, but the only problem is the width, at least for kitchen gardening – it’s impossible to reach the weeds popping up in the middle of the bed without crawling into it and compressing the soil and getting dirty knees, feet and palms. I prefer a raised bed with a maximum width of 1 meter ~ 3.3 ft.

This particular raised bed was most likely built as an ornamental bed for flowers etc., and it matches the house well.

Photo by Choking Sun.

A nice looking right-angled raised bed made out of planed timber:

Photo by Milton Taam.

Ordinary raised beds, but with a tall fence around them to keep out animals – or kids Toddlers don’t know the difference between weeds and vegetables, so if you’re serious about kitchen gardening you might want to consider setting up a fence around the “other babies” (= precious homegrown vegetables ). This will save you a lot of stress.

Notice the border between the raised bed in the middle and the lawn – the grass grows taller here because the lawnmower is not able to cut that close to the planks:

Photo by Amanda B.

You’ll need either a grass trimmer to remove this last line of grass, a pair of scissors and a lot of patience, or perhaps a line of paving stones around the beds, if you don’t want this perfect habitat for slugs right next to your lettuce.

A beautiful garden with a mixture brick and mortar and wooden raised beds:

Photo by PermaCultured. (Newtown Community Garden, corner of Longdown & Stephen St, Newtown Sydney)

A collection of different types of raised bed designs to get ideas from, and perhaps you already know how you want to build yours? Project photos with comments are welcome – please send them in and we’ll do a showcase post here on HappyFarming.com. Contact details are here: Contact HappyFarming.com.

It’s a bit difficult the see the bean plants climbing up the stems, but you can tell that there’s a bean plant in there somewhere because the leaves are light green instead of dark green. The bean plant growing on the tree to the left is even harder to spot since this is a purple bean plant variety.

I planted each bean plant in their own clay pot below the trees:

If I hadn’t used the young trees as bean trellises for runner beans they would probably have been cut down, because they were self-seeded. It turns out that as these trees grew taller they actually shielded my small container garden pretty well from the wind, which is important, or else your tomato plants and cucumber plants might easily be ripped apart during a storm.

A close-up picture of one of the stems clearly shows that there’s a bean plant growing on the stem:

And as usual – the bean plant is growing counter-clockwise around the stem or trellis. And no, it’s not related to your geographical location, i.e. if you’re living on the northern or southern hemisphere.

Small green beans have started to form and more flowers are developing so soon I’ll be able to harvest something for the kitchen!

The bamboo sticks run all the way to the bottom of the soil tube inside the self-watering container and stabilizes the whole tomato trellis. These kind of bamboo sticks don’t easily rot which is nice since they can be used for several seasons.

The small tomato plants are tied to the bamboo sticks inside the metal cage to keep them steady in the wind:

I’m living in a rented house at the moment so instead of using screws I bent a couple of cable metal holders to fit over the edge of the rain gutter and attached strings down to the bamboo sticks to keep the tomato trellises steady in the wind:

Normally I use bamboo sticks for bean trellises too but why not use the natural environment for bean trellises if you can. I’ve placed two climbing bean seedlings in pots beneath a couple of wild tree shoots hoping the beans will find their way up these two 2 m tall sticks (6 feet):

There’s a giant corkscrew willow growing near the terrace that I plan to use as bean trellis too. A couple of plastic pots with climbing bean seedlings have been placed on the table below the tree:

I’m just looking forward to some sun, heat and rain now

I’m drilling a hole for each screw and using a larger drill to bury the head of the screw.

The screws are actually drywall screws and it’s probably not 100% technically correct to use these (whatever that means ) but it’s seems like a good solution anyway, and I already had a large box of screws collecting dust so I’ll take my chances.

A month ago small leaves broke the soil and in the last month the potato plant grew like crazy:

Now this is not a normal looking potato plant – the problem is that the pot has been placed indoors without much sunlight. Therefore the plant is stretching for the light and the stem gets too weak to hold its own weight .

I have a couple of other potato tubers with small shoots sticking out of the ends ready to be planted. The best shoot length is about 1 cm (0.4 inch) because if they are allowed to grow longer the shoots will be weak and are likely to break off during planting :

I have these cool racks with shelves that I’m planning on using for germination and raising seedlings. A couple of pots with strawberry plants are already placed on one of the top shelves:

To keep the plants from stretching their stalks to reach more sun I have installed a grow light neon tube. I bought the neon tube more than a year ago because I wanted to raise seedlings in my garage but I never managed to install it. Now I’m finally setting it up:

“The light tailor-made for your plants” (L=1200 mm / Ø=26 mm)

This is the Sylvania Gro-Lux 36 watts grow light in action:

The neon tube casing is just resting on top of the racks with the top shelves removed:

I don’t know how close to the plants the grow light has to be to get the best growth, but I’ll probably have to install some wires in the ceiling to be able to move the light up and down.

The good thing about this new place is that there’s a relatively big terrace where I can put several containers, and the house has a long south facing wall, which is perfect for tomatoes, cucumbers etc. On top of that, the house might out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s big. Plenty of room for a sweet aquaponics system. My girlfriend is into aquarium fish so I’m excited to find out  what the two of us can come up with combining fish and plants in one system. Check out my review if you want a primer on aquaponics.

The cat moved with us too and we brought the chicken coop too. We dumped the coop on the terrace but the coop is empty for now as it was before. I don’t think the landlord would appreciate a large chicken run on his lawn But again, we’ll be moving in half a year anyway, hopefully to a place with some land of our own.

Not having my own land is irritating but I guess it’s the reality for a lot of people as super-farms are developing. If you still want to grow your own food it seems to me that aquaponics is a brilliant answer to this challenge but time will tell if I’m able to get it up and running. As far as self-sufficiency I think you would need you own plot anyway although the efficiency of an aquaponics system supposedly is very high, so I think self-sufficiency is a bit into the future for me, but it sure would be a cool thing to reach. Freedom, independence and power to the people!

I still have some unpacking to do so I’ll leave you for now. I just wanted to let you know that I still want to grow my own food – how about you?

The sign-up form is located in the right sidebar under the heading “Subscribe to email newsletter”. Since I started sending out the newsletter I have only sent out about five emails, but the plan is to send it out every week when I get up to speed, to let you in behind the scenes. Just type in your name and your email address and click the submit button below the form and I’ll send you the ebook right away.

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The roosting box fits perfectly behind the roosting hatch, in the roosting area on top of the egg laying area:

At this point I realized that I had mounted the roosting hatch upside down, because the stabilizing frame on the roosting hatch is bumping into the roosting box when I close the hatch. The frame should be free of the box, and there’s room enough for that if the frame was mounted further up on the hatch (or the hatch was turned 180 degrees before mounting ):

When the roosting hatch is closed the box is pushed a bit into the coop due to this mistake but for now I’m going to leave the coop as it is and consider the project completed. Phew!

The first post in this series is here: Building a Chicken Coop – Part 1.

My review of the chicken coop plans is here: Chicken Coop Guide Review.

The idea that 35 million people go to bed hungry in the United States of America is absolutely disgusting, and there is no excuse for it, and we can solve this problem as gardeners, without any money being put into this program from the government. The nice thing about this program is nothing slips between the lip and the cup. This is private people doing something on their own …

– Jeff Lowenfels

(The interview starts at 2:23)

This is one of the last things to build before the coop is finished and ready for chickens, except a roosting box.

Before painting I gave the coop a layer of wood primer:

It’s thin and almost clear so you can’t tell if it has been applied:

And finally the paint:

The last part in this series about building a chicken coop will be about the roosting box.