Composting and Raised Bed Gardening Together in Any Space

Create a raised bed, compost and rotate your garden crops in one space using this convenient garden technique.

My friend Ray taught me this easy method. Measure out your garden beds. You’ll create 4 feet wide beds and 2 or 3 feet wide paths. Rake the soil from the pathways into the bed area. This creates a raised garden. The simple act of raising the soil helps create better drainage.

Use the pathways to compost garden debris such as annual weeds that have not gone to seed, outer leaves of cabbage, greens from root crops and the like. This is a form of sheet composting. As you walk down the aisles to tend the raised beds you will help break down the green debris and speed up decomposition.

Next year, the pathway becomes your planting beds and planting beds your new pathways. So you’ll automatically be changing your planting location.

A bit more information: Ray was able to grow five crops of leaf lettuce in his Wisconsin garden using this and other intensive garden techniques. He used floating row covers to extend the growing season, started transplants indoors to beat the heat and shorten the in-garden growing time to harvest and he grew heat tolerant varieties during the summer.