Raised Beds as A Renter
My garden was starting to get a little bit much for the backyard space I had with everything being in pots and buckets. So I decided to upgrade.
I searched around and found 2 raised beds 10 foot by 2 foot by 1 foot deep without bottoms and I got it on a deal on Amazon.
But I’m a renter.. so these aren’t permanent and that’s exactly the reason why everything I have is still in buckets and containers.
But I have 27 plants different plants going, some have multiples. So I have a lot of plants and I wanted more space because my ultimate goal is to grow enough tea herbs to last me throughout the winter. And I drink a lot of tea. When it’s cold, herbal tea is my replacement for water. Then there’s herbal baths.. you get my point.
So I figured for anyone else who is renter, you might be interested in what I’m doing. The first thing that my husband reminded me to do was check the lease and see if we are allowed to do a raised bed. Thankfully- we are! But we will have to seed some grass before we leave. No bigge.
Garden Planning
As I am still learning about the plants that I am growing, I had some AI assistance in laying out my garden. I will only be using this garden for one season (June-December) before it gets broken down and moved to a new house. Most seed packets and online information tells you the mature plant size, but my plants won’t all be fully mature by the end of this season, which is where the AI help came in.
This is the layout that I came up with based on the bot’s information. I will have one bed dedicated mostly to food herbs and vegetables and the other dedicated to tea herbs.
I also made sure to got o suncalc.org and checked the sun’s course around my house.
This way I would know what taller herbs and vegetables are going to be casting shade in certain directions.
The raised beds that I bought are galvanized steel and required me to put them together. But it only took me about an hour to do so. The first one was a bit confusing because the instructions weren’t the best (think IKEA instructions). The second one took half the time because I used a drill and I had an idea of what I was doing.
Filling the Beds
To fill the beds, I first laid out some cardboard to kill the grass and act as a slight barrier. Then I took the sticks from around the yard and some old firewood and used that as the first layer.
The second layer was some old firewood and sticks under a thin layer old, badly maintained compost that has been sitting in an old trash can for about a year.
Then came the new materials. I spent about $60 at Lowe’s and bought:
4 bags of Scotts Top soil
6 bags of Black Kow compost
3 bags of Sta-rite brown mulch
That filled my beds about half way. It was disappointing, but I over estimated how much my little compost bucket had in it.
So I ran up to Walmart and bought 10 - 2 cubic foot bags of garden soil for another $50. I ended up using 8 of the 10 bags and kept the other 2 for later.
I didn’t want to fill the beds to the brim as I wanted to give new seedling and sprouts a small amount of wind protection. Also, my beds are not on level ground, because Virginia is not level anywhere, which means that when I water the garden or it rains, the water would have run over the top of the bed instead of percolating down into the soil.
Now all that’s left is tagging the plants the survive the transplant into the garden bed.
During this process, I realized that I wanted an app that would help me with all of the companion planting, light requirements and laying out my garden in addition to all the things that gardening apps offer. So with my husbands help, we are creating a gardening app that will help you lay out your beds, and garden from seed to tea cup. Keep an eye out for it as I am hoping to get it out by the end of 2026!