Raised beds or sunken beds.  Nothing like a little controversy to get your minds spurned on to think of why you do some things the way you do.  I’ve heard of others who say that with our climate it is better to dig out your plot and make it sunken.  How about you?  Have you heard of sunken beds?   I, myself, prefer raised beds and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, my garden plots always begin flat.  It just takes them a few years to get up to the raised bed status.  The garden in the photo above started out completely flat.  By adding adequate compost and manure twice a year, my garden plot naturally grew “up”.  If you dig a sunken plot it’s eventually going to slowly be morphing into a raised plot, so you might as well save yourself some energy from the get go and not dig out a sunken plot.  It’s hard enough to break up the hard dirt, let alone dig out the dirt for the sunken plot. Our native dirt here is like a rock.

For those who don’t want to till the “rock” dirt, building a traditional raised bed takes less effort, but more money.  Filling up a raised bed to begin with takes an incredible amount of compost and manure.  If money is no option, go for the raised bed to skirt around tilling.

Whichever way you prefer to start your garden plot really depends on the amount of energy and money you want to put into it.  I am “Mrs. Frugal”, so I prefer putting more energy and less money into my garden.  My flat garden eventually becomes raised anyway.

By the way, I’ve just discovered a new garden site that has so much fun and useful information.  Don’t check it out, though, until you have a chunk of time to look through it.  I have spent way too much time wandering through all the articles.

I hope you all are thoroughly enjoying your gardens and if you don’t have a garden, just stay tuned and in the next couple of months my dad and I will walk you through how to get a spring garden plot up and going!