“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.”- Audrey Hepburn

If you have given gardening a try, you probably know you do not only need efforts for maintaining only. Whether it takes up smaller or wider space, a garden requires true dedication for the best outcome. As Audrey Hepburn herself explains in her Gardens of the World series, gardening gives us the hope of tomorrow.

What makes gardening so special is knowing your planting will bring visible results eventually, giving you the pleasure of seeing your efforts pay off. The wish to create something beautiful is essential to our being and is a universal need. What could be better than gardening to form beauty! But with the busy lives we lead nowadays, maintaining a garden may be more of a chore than pleasure due to lack of time. This is where raised garden beds come to the rescue.

There is a wide range of raised garden beds to choose from, varying in price based on the material they are made of (the higher the quality, the longer they will last). Because of their size, they make gardening easier and less of a trouble to maintain. However (and this may sound more demanding), with garden beds you have to make sure to take care of the watering more often than you would with plants that are not in raised garden beds (in the beginning at least). Here are some maintenance points you should have in mind with this kind of gardening.

To ease your process you could implement some watering system, such as soaker hoses. Though it is often compulsory, you need not worry about your water bill. The compact size of the garden bed makes watering less time-consuming than with regular gardens. Because it is a compact space, you have to ensure the garden bed is neither too shallow nor deep, yet still the right amount of depth for roots to fully develop. Furthermore, small size means raised garden beds take less time to clean.

Just as water is basic necessity for plants, so is the sun. Not only does sun provide plants with the indispensable energy, but it is also beneficial for the soil especially when you want to prevent unnecessary weed growth and pest problems. You can do this with the so-called process of solarisation. What this process does is it heats the soil through a covering and absorbs the sun energy, plus it saves up all the nutrients.

During the first years, it is also important to frequently fertilise the soil, which would be great in the long run. Fertilising is crucial for the proper growth of the plants, and is the surest way of retaining nutrients. Organic fertilisers could be a nice option.

Recently, many studies have confirmed the positive impact gardening has on people’s overall health which is a reason more to grow your own garden and start enjoying its benefits.