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30 Raised Garden Bed Design Ideas
Discover ideas for upgrading your yard using raised beds.
Brick, stones, or recycled materials can be used to make raised beds that are as simple or artistic as you wish. For plants to establish themselves and mature, a raised bed planter can be either a temporary or permanent installation. Depending on how complicated you construct your raised bed, the initial cost will vary. If you create raised beds from leftover bricks or old planks, you can do it for little to no cost. Raised beds don’t cost any extra to maintain once they are built than conventional gardens.
The foundation material you use will depend on whether you want it to be a permanent or temporary bed. Cardboard, newspaper, concrete, straw, mulch, wood shavings, leaves, grass clippings, rock, hessian, wool, landscape fabric and plastic are some common materials used for the basis of raised garden beds. To prevent water from pooling or making the soil wet, line the bottom of a large raised bed with large stones, plastic bottles or straw. The bottom of your raised bed planter should have drainage holes planned.
Get Motivated by These Ideas for Raised Garden Beds
Although it is not necessary to line a planter, whether it be made of brick or not, doing so is advised since it prevents animals from digging up the roots of your plants and provides for effective drainage without letting the soil wash away.
What Is a Raised Garden Bed?
Growing plants in soil that is higher than the ground is known as raised bed gardening. The most popular way to do this is with a frame or enclosure made of wood, stone, hay bales, or even recycled materials like old dressers.
Benefits of Raised Garden Beds
Many advantages come with raised beds, including improved soil drainage, deeper plantings that require less bending over, and the ability to remove temporary constructions if you decide against maintaining them. The benefits are as follows:
- Easier on the back of a gardener
- Looks good
- Fewer incursions of pests
- Enhanced drainage
- Less weeds
- More favourable soil temperatures
- It could be momentary or ongoing.
- Less worry about contaminated dirt
1.Custom-Designed Raised Beds
Practically any location can accommodate raised bed gardens. You may design a full outdoor seating area with a little imagination. Peter Donegan Landscaping used straightforward straight lines to create this multi-level raised bed. A lamppost and potting shed are included. You can create seats for the outside dining area by adding a bench piece, similar to the one at the end of the front bed. This garden will seem natural and rustic as the plants mature and the wood ages.
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2.Built-In Red Brick Raised Beds
Raised beds made of red brick can improve the look of your backyard or farm. Instead of digging an in-ground bed, construct a raised bed where the sun or shade would benefit the plants you wish to grow.
Not everyone is suited to bricklaying. To get it correctly, a lot of time and accuracy are required. Select bricks that can withstand persistent moisture well. The majority of raised red brick beds are constructed using mortar to preserve the walls.
3. Grow Bag Raised Beds
Since raised bed gardens are located well above the subsurface frost line, the soil warms up more quickly in the spring, allowing you to begin planting earlier.
Your choice of bed material matters because metal retains more solar heat. However, grow bags are a fantastic alternative because their soil defrosts rather rapidly and they don’t freeze solid. Furthermore, it is a fantastic technique to supply the heat required for Mediterranean plants like sage and lavender to develop. Although using grow bags might seem too simple, you might quickly have a fantastic raised bed garden.
4. Herb Spiral Garden
A common permaculture approach is spiral gardens. They expand the area that can be used for planting without taking up more garden space. They are simple to construct from materials like wood, stone, or brick, or you can just pile the earth.
Your garden’s centre point will be an eye-catching swirl of plants in an unusual shape. In this image, herbs are the preferred plants, however the spiral pattern can be used to produce any type of plant.
5. Trough Gardens
Using animal feeding troughs is one of the simplest ways to build raised bed gardens. There is no assembly required, however before adding soil, make sure to drill a few drainage holes at the bottom. As it conducts heat, the metal gives the garden an industrial appearance and warms the soil in the spring.
Depending on the style you want and what is available, you can use either new or old troughs. The plants may require a little additional water throughout the warmest portion of the summer depending on what you decide to grow.
6. Square Foot Raised Beds
In square foot gardening, the growing space is divided into small square parts, usually measuring one foot each. The goal is to create a kitchen garden that is extremely productive or a vegetable garden that is densely planted. Netting is one of the many materials that may be used to measure and divide this.
When you plant vegetables in a raised bed, you can manage the soil’s quality and keep it from getting compacted. Vegetable roots can expand unrestrictedly. To benefit from being in a raised bed, the beds do not need to be extremely high off the ground. It might be as little as 6 to 8 inches.
7. Flower Boxes as Raised Beds
Limited options exist for raised beds. If your fence is robust, you can affix wooden boxes to it to use as little raised beds, similar to window boxes. These may maintain their attractive appearance all year long by stepping in as perennials stop blooming. As a special decoration idea for the winter holidays, you may also adorn these spaces with seasonal plants and ornaments.
8. Cinderblock Raised Beds
Raised beds can be constructed in a variety of ways using recycled materials. One of the most common types is concrete block, sometimes known as cinderblock. The “cinders” left behind from burning coal, known as fly ash, may be present in some older cinder blocks. Whether this is safe to use among plants that can be eaten is still up for dispute. By purchasing fresh concrete-made blocks, you can get rid of the ash problem. Despite being significantly heavier than older cinder blocks, the new blocks are fine for a vegetable garden.
Concrete blocks, however, leech lime, so use caution. Lime can increase the pH of the soil. Use plants that do well in alkaline soil for safety. These robust succulents and sedums are suitable for these planters because they are hardy and are not picky about the soil.
9. Hoop House Raised Bed
You can establish a multi-season vegetable garden with some advance planning. Raised beds make it easier for you to manage the growing conditions in your garden and make it more difficult for animals to access your produce. You can be ready for any weather, withstand frost, and give yourself a head start in the spring if you construct a hoop house on top of a raised bed. In case of frost, this thin netting is strong enough to support a textile covering.
10. Raised Bed Border
A great alternative for yards with steep slopes is raised beds. You can provide the appearance of a level garden by raising the beds at their lowest points. Make your beds big enough to accommodate perennials that will offer colour, texture, and edge-softening drapes while yet allowing for a layered flower garden with a border of shrubs surrounding the garden’s rear. In order to take advantage of the garden’s placement on a steep hill, it has a series of raised beds with rock borders.
11. Space Saving Design ideas
Raised bed designs can be imaginatively used by gardeners with limited area to maximise their resources. In this ingenious design, a wooden raised bed flower box constructed of salvaged materials is placed on top of the area where garbage bins are kept. This brightens up what is typically a dull location and adds beauty to a functional but utilitarian space. The decorations and string lights give it a unique touch.
12. Raised Bed Arbor
You can grow more plants by using vertical gardening, which uses less room. It is significantly simpler to pick vegetables from a raised bed when using a trellis or arbour, and they stay more orderly than if they were left to spread on the ground. This raised bed of zucchini plants demonstrates how your design can be as straightforward as building a fundamental frame out of two dowels (or bamboo poles). Garden netting spread across the trellis frame may be advantageous for other crops.
13. Lasagna Garden Raised Beds
Although there is no need to dig in lasagna gardens, the phrase has evolved to refer to employing materials other than dirt below the topsoil layer. In this instance, wooden raised beds are built, filled with chopped wood and grass clippings, then covered with topsoil. If your plantings don’t have a deep root system, this lessens the heavy weight and cost of soil.
14. Milk Crate Garden
Your raised bed will be portable if you repurpose milk crates. You may alter this milk crate-raised bed into any shape you like, and it is simple to set up. Pick up the crate and move it if you need to move your plants closer to your kitchen or to a more shady location. Drainage holes are already included in these containers. Additionally, you can raise the box, empty its contents into a compost pile, and start over whenever you need to switch the soil.
15. Raised Bed and Container Design
Maybe you want to add extra decoration and fullness to your brick raised beds. You can play with different levels that lure the eyes up and down and allow for an almost infinite variety of sizes and shapes by positioning containers below the brick wall’s level. You can even arrange your plantings to offer visual appeal throughout the entire year. Additionally, containers can be moved at any time to change the design.
16. Pallet Garden
An upcycled packing pallet can be used to create a living wall covered in plants, or it can be laid flat on the ground to create a raised bed with natural dividers between the slats to maintain orderly plant growth. Pallets are frequently available for free from companies that receive shipments but don’t have a carting service to remove them.
17. Repurpose an Old Table
Sometimes you want to give your room a makeover since styles change. Maybe an old wooden coffee or kitchen table is destined for the trash. Consider it again before discarding it. Your next elevated bed can be made from the table’s legs or the whole thing. Grow some easy-to-pick herbs that can be harvested at table height. Although wooden materials will eventually deteriorate, you can hold out for a few more years before rot takes hold.
18. Brick and Cobblestone Rows
Consider dry-stacking rows of retaining wall bricks, red bricks, or cobblestones to construct a solid raised bed that can withstand the test of time. Wall blocks and cobblestones were durable enough for ancient Egyptians and Romans and have endured for millennia.
You don’t need mortar, but if you use masonry glue to hold them together when stacking bricks more than four bricks (or levels) high, the construction will endure longer. Build a wall with an inner and outer layer that is two bricks or stones thick all the way around for greater stability.
19. Furniture Redux
Tables appear to be designed to support a raised box that is filled with dirt. Older furniture items including dressers, a chest of drawers, media centres, mattresses and cribs, and baths destined for the trash are less obvious options. Old drawers make excellent planters for a variety of plant types.
20. Make It a Destination
In strategic, scenic locations, bench sitting is frequently incorporated into cottage gardens and thoughtful landscaping. When creating a raised box from scratch, take into account include seating.
While seating is great for relaxing in the yard, it also serves a useful purpose. The addition of chairs will make weeding, trimming and other maintenance tasks easier to manage if you’re building a wooden raised bed garden box that is several feet tall.
21. Enclosed Raised Beds
Deer, rabbits, and other foraging or burrowing animals can quickly ruin your garden. Plan to enclose your raised beds if you live in a location where animal activity threatens to ruin your garden dreams. You may either build a proper enclosure with a door or start out simply with 3-foot corner posts completely covered in chicken wire. The most important thing is to maintain the top open to allow birds to browse for seeds and, in the case of hummingbirds, nectar.
22. Straw Bale Garden
Ingenious gardeners have discovered that straw and hay bales provide a great growing medium in rural areas of the country where they are abundant. Flowers and herbs thrive when cultivated in bales. Hay decomposes in a year, however straw might last for two, which is twice as long as hay. Straw is also more affordable, lighter, and less likely to contain pesticides.
3 to 5 gallons of water can fit inside a bale. Anything over that point will evaporate. Unless you are planting tiny seeds, you rarely even need soil.
23. Planting Boxes on Wheels
You can build raised planting boxes to make gardening much simpler. Create them with wheels so you may move your plants to meet various lighting requirements or to get them closer to you. Build a raised bed planting box with shelves to house your planting containers and gardening equipment if you need to store some of your gardening supplies. A wheelbarrow can also be used in another way.
24. Reuse Culvert Pipes
Stormwater or drainage ditches typically use culvert pipes. They are composed of metal or plastic and range in diameter from 6 inches to 8 feet. Consider them once more as building materials for raised beds. They are at the very least 10 feet long. You can build many rings for a circle of raised beds by cutting them to any length.
25. Make a Terracotta or PVC Pipe Garden
Succulents and other plants that prefer drier soils do well in terracotta because it is permeable. One-foot lengths of PVC or terracotta pipes can be vertically flipped on their side to fence in dirt for a substantial raised bed. Each pipe’s interior can be used as a little planter for herbs or smaller border plants. PVC pipes, on the other hand, are a good alternative because they don’t rust or rot, are non-porous, and hold more water than terracotta.
26. Get More Out of Old Tire Retirement
Old, used tyres are another great option for raised bed containers, despite their unattractive appearance. Some have come up with lovely methods to decorate them, including painting the outside or stacking them into columns.
27. Make Use of Logs and Sticks
A raised planting bed made of recently felled tree logs with their bark still on is a lovely, organic choice. Additionally, twigs and sticks can be braided into sheets to create one of the four sides of square or rectangular boxes, or they can be placed in vertical stacks or stands to create a container’s whole perimeter.
28. Tree Stump Planter
Most people cut down or uproot and remove dead trees when they occur. Some people choose to remove the majority of the tree and let the stump rot naturally over time. It may take many years for the degradation to start; in the meantime, scoop down the centre of the stump and turn it into a raised planter to make it more attractive. Plant flowers or anything else you want to give it new life after adding some gravel and soil that has been fertilised with compost.
29. Corrugated Metal Raised Bed
For a raised bed that looks industrial, corrugated metal, which is frequently used for roofing panels, might be framed in wood. The steel sheets can be used in edible gardens without any problems. There is no evidence that they leak any dangerous compounds. Since metal is also said to be reflective, it doesn’t absorb as much heat or sunlight, keeping the soil’s temperature lower than with many other materials used to make raised containers.
30. Plastic Storage Containers Can Grow Too
Plastic storage bins can be converted into growth boxes like the “Earthbox.” Although they don’t have a fancy appearance, they work well. The Earthbox is a self-watering plastic growing container that masterfully regulates watering, fertilising, and all the other elements that require careful attention to create healthy plants.