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Attention all gardeners! If you’ve struggled with yearly tilling, battling moles and gophers and heavy rocky soil, consider raised bed gardening. Raised beds are an especially smart choice for older or disabled gardeners, affording a place to sit and easy access to plants for harvesting.

Raised beds require some initial work, but when you’re finished, maintenance is a breeze, throughout the growing season, and fall and spring chores. Better still, renewing your soil becomes easier with each passing year. In just a few years, you’ll have the most friable soil you’ve seen. Raised beds are warmer, allowing you to plant earlier. Raised beds also drain better than conventional gardens, giving your crops an important advantage. Since the beds need never be walked on, no soil compaction occurs.

Enclosed in a wooden box or even hay bales, the beds look neater, but an enclosure is not necessary. You can simply mound the amended soil covering an area about four feet by eight feet. These dimensions assure you can comfortably reach all areas of the raised beds.

Whichever option you choose, install screening on top of the ground, fine enough to keep out moles and gophers. Then add your soil. Water and fertilize, then wait three days before planting. Give some earthworms a home in your new raised beds. Raised beds can be planted more densely than a conventional garden, often with larger yields per square foot. Denser plantings and well mulched beds keep weeds to a minimum.

Inter-planting techniques can increase yields as well. For example, staging successive plantings of carrots, basil and tomatoes has three advantages. The carrots and basil receive light shade and cooler temperatures beneath the tomato’s branches on the hottest summer days. The tomatoes thrive in the same space. Basil is a companion plant for tomatoes, enhancing tomato flavor and deterring pests. All in a small space.

Gravel walkways at least two feet wide between the beds keeps weeding chores down and allow comfortable access. You can use wood chips over black plastic to prevent walkway weeds entirely. You can go fancy with brick pathways. Certain herbs, bulbs and common garden flowers may be planted at the perimeters of walkways to deter a variety of garden pests.

When fall comes, and the crops are finished, prepare your beds for winter. Pull plants and work the soil lightly. Mix in compost and leaf mold to enrich your beds. A winter cover crop of alfalfa or red clover will fix nitrogen in the soil for a good start in the spring.

“Start small” is good advice for beginning gardeners. If you construct only one bed this year, it will be fun and manageable as you learn the ropes. Raised beds are the perfect add as you go along project. Start small your first year. You’ll be delighted with the results and armed with enthusiasm and experience to expand next year’s garden.

Are you all into yard work and landscaping around your home? Hey, it’s okay if you are. You’re definitely not alone in this. Just take a gander at Middle America. Heck, just take a look at my neighborhood. Could these folks mow their lawns anymore than they already do? I think once a week is sufficient. Many individuals and family are big into landscaping. Whether they’re putting in a garden, planting oodles of pretty flowers, building a row of trees for privacy or landscaping with rocks, there seems to be no end to it all. Personally I can barely keep the yard mowed. But we’ll just keep that on the down low.

When it comes to landscaping with rocks, I know a little more than most probably care to know. I grew up in rural Iowa. We had a house way out in the middle of nowhere. This is why I laugh when folks tell me that they’re from a small town of 10,000 or so. Ha, that’s nothing! There were less than 1,500 people in my town. Now that’s tiny. Actually it’s kind of sad when I really think about it. Anyway, back to the landscaping with rocks spiel. We lived out in the boonies, right next to the Turkey River. And no I didn’t make that name up, it really is a river that runs into the Mississippi.

We had a 15 acre spread of farmland and trees. One fine summer day, my father informed my brother and me that we were going to be landscaping with rocks all day long. Dear God I wanted this to be a joke. It was not a joke. We were told to head down to the river and fetch rock slabs and carry them back up to the house. Yikes, this was going to be a major hassle. Now, don’t forget that I was only 14 at the time. We started running after the rock slabs. We slowly dragged plenty of them up from the river after hours and hours of hauling. My father and step-mother were consistently landscaping with rocks near the mailbox. They were basically building a wall in a hill of grass, which looked amazing when they were finished. I guess landscaping with rocks can have some awesome results if you know what you’re doing.

For tips regarding landscaping with rocks or any sort of landscaping for that matter, you can easily get on the web for assistance. Sort through a number of free websites that can literally tell you where to begin. You can start landscaping with rocks today.