Concrete Block Raised Bed Gardening

by Jessica Craven

Concrete Block Raised Bed Gardening

Concrete block raised bed gardening is a very popular method for creating separate areas with different purposes in your yard. Find out about concrete block raised bed gardening with help from an expert with extensive experience working with school gardens and horticultural therapy gardens in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hello. My name is Jessica Craven. I'm a master gardener with my certification in permaculture design. Today we're going to talk about how to do raised bed gardens with concrete blocks. Now raised bed gardens are very popular and a lot of people use wood or plastic lumber and things like that. But another thing that you can use is concrete blocks. And one of the advantages of using concrete blocks is they do not decompose. They're going to stay there and also there's nothing toxic that they're giving off to your plants. So what you want to do is you want to start by digging a bit of a trench down. I would say at least 3 to 4 inches deep so that you can anchor the concrete blocks. Now before you start putting in the blocks you'll want to put down a layer of hardware cloth. And this is a quarter inch metal hardware cloth and that will keep things like gophers or moles from digging up from underneath and invading your garden and eating the roots of your plants. Then you want to basically start by putting concrete blocks down. And you want to have them in a nice square. I would recommend making certain that your concrete block raised bed garden is no wider than 3 feet deep. Otherwise it's very difficult to reach into your plants to get around and that sort of type of thing. You can do something like this here where I've got a section of the yard divided off with these pavers that are very similar to concrete blocks. And I've got my artichokes planted behind there to give my yard a level of interest. You can also have raised bed concrete block in like 3 foot by 3 foot or 3 foot by 6 foots segments throughout your yard. And the great thing is you can start with one, see if you like it and then expand it to other areas of your yard. Now when you have these concrete raised bed gardens what you want to do is you want to add gardening soil to it. And that way your plants will grow a lot better because most of us do not have loam soil. We have either sandy soil or we have clay-like soil. And that will allow you to grow very very healthy plants. The other thing that you want to remember with concrete raised bed gardening is that you don't have to have an ambitious large project. They're very heavy. You can buy enough for one area, make it basically two block high or even three blocks high if you need to not lean over so much, if you want your plants at a higher level. It gives you a lot of flexibility with height. So I hope these tips will help you in building your concrete raised bed garden.

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