size of beds?

[janeyo]

Hi I am taking over the board tonight with all my amatuer babblings, lol (OH is tiling the utility floor and there is nowt on tv and no light so can't get outside and DIG)

I am not very tall (5'4 on a good day) and didn't want to have beds that need a lot of walking on and wanted ones that I can reach from both sides without getting on them. I have made my first raised one 8ft by 3 feet. Is this too small? My mum said this was too small to grow anything in!

I thought it might be a more manageable size and am planning on having 4 or 5.
There will be 2 feet between them with old slabs.

Thanks janeyo

ps is it worth putting asparagus in a raised bed or will it do on the flat? And raspberries? Do they need flat?

Sorry if it sounds obvious!

[smallblueplanet]

You want to make sure that you can reach across your raised bed from one side to the other, you do not want to walk on them.

The width of our raised beds is 1.05m. (The wood was in 2.1m lengths)

[janeyo]

Yep I can definitely reach from one side to the other, and I guess length matters not!

I will tell my mum, ya boo sucks, lol

janeyo

[Snadger]

I am reasonably tall and my beds are 4 foot wide! Beginning to wish I'd made them 3 foot 6 inches wide instead.

3 foot should be fine for a short *rse!

btw 12 foot is the reccommended maximum for length of beds!

[zazen999]

Hi

My courtyard ones are 1m square and the ones by the canal are 1.8m square - and these are lightly too wide to be honest.

That's 3.3 feet and 5.8 feet, according to my calculator. Yours sound fine - to be honest any patch is enough to grow things on - it all depends on the size of the thing!!!

[bobleponge]

You are a veritable giant compared to the boss, and our beds are about 3ft 4" wide. She can reach to the middle from both sides but it does get a bit eeeeeeekkkk right in the centre.
Tell your mum nah nah ne nah nah, but politely of course. She is your mum after all.
Asparagus I cant help you with but our rasps just grow in a clump directly into our clay soil, no raised beds for them.

[Phreddy]

My beds were 1mtr - too big, trying 90cms this year.
I am 5'6 but an old fella with bending etc problems so I need to work from a stool.
My beds are 15 mtrs long - yes, that is right, reducing them to 7mtr so that it is not so far to walk round.
No point in making a raised bed for Asparagus although, if you want to make it neater and in keeping with the rest of the beds, then do it.
Raspberries need a fence or similar. They are a two year cycle. Cut away old wood that had last years fruit and tie in new canes: You let the new canes grow up the middle then next year spread them away from the centre to make room for the new ones.

[cottage garden]

It doesn't matter if your beds appear quite small, much more important that they are comfortable to work with. Better to have lots of small usable beds than a large one that you can't reach the middle.
Its amazing how much veg you can cram into a raised beds, with so much more space for roots you can really cram them in (Something to tell your mum!).
My raspberries are just on clay soil as well.

[carlseawolf]

4' wide and from 12' to 25' long , and 1' high

[TonyF]

My beds in situ are 2.4m long by 1.2m wide and where they're where I now have most of the fruit bushes.

But the new beds will only be 1m wide and various lengths, between 2.5 and 4 meters because I need to put them in cross ways, like terracing. on ground that gets wider as it gets closer to the house - odd shaped plot in places.

But this time I'm using 4m long heavy duty boards and apart from the 2.5m cut, they're all easy to work out length and width wise - if you see what I mean, 1 m width = 3 m length.