There’s something truly special about stepping into a garden that you’ve nurtured from the seed touching the soil, to your first harvest. But as any seasoned gardener knows, the first sprout begins with choosing the right foundation for your plants. Today, we will discuss a topic that’s as old as thyme: raised beds versus grow towers.
Imagine this: A sunrise casting its first golden rays over your personal patch of produce. In one corner, a raised bed full of sweet potato vines running up an arc trellis. Along the fence is another raised bed with a row of tall okra plants in the front, and cucumber plants behind them running up their own individual trellises.
In another section of the yard, grow towers standing tall with kale, red chard, celery, bokchoy cabbage and other leafy greens. This is only the beginning of what is possible with a little bit of research and effort on your part.
Raised Beds: The Traditional Choice with a Twist
There are timeless benefits to raised beds. They’re like the classic novel on your bookshelf - familiar, dependable, and surprisingly deep. Raised beds provide excellent drainage, deter some garden pests, and offer a longer growing season due to their soil warming up faster than the ground. They’re your go-to for flexibility, as they can be built to any size, enabling you to tailor your garden to the space you have, be it a large backyard, or a small corner.
Grow Towers: Vertical Gardens
Then we have grow towers, the high-risers of horticulture. These towers are a testament to innovation, letting you cultivate a column of greenery upward. They’re the space-savers, the back-savers, and the conversation starters of the gardening world. Also, when it comes to style, they’re second to none – who wouldn’t want a full living pillar of edible plants strategically displayed in their limited outdoor space?
Quenching Thirst With DripWorks Irrigation
Both raised beds and grow towers thrive with the right watering system.
With technology becoming such an integrated part of our daily lives, watering our plants is now as easy as pressing a button on our phone.
This is where companies like DripWorks shine. Imagine a drip system that has an automatic timer, on a customized weekly watering schedule, that delivers just the right amount of water to each plant's roots with precision.
No drop wasted, every plant satiated. With DripWorks' automatic drip system, you’re not just watering plants, you’re nurturing them.
The majority of our outdoor plants are on an automatic drip irrigation system with timer. The amount of time that we save is unbelievable. With this technology, I can never see us going back to watering our plants by hand. We have too many plants, and too little time.
Watering Raised Beds
The drip lines in our raised beds deliver just enough water for our plants. Currently, in one of our raised beds, we are growing sweet potatoes. We plan on keeping these in the bed and harvesting after the summer has passed.
In the other bed, we have Okra and cucumbers growing. This bed is close to our fence, and does not get as much sun as the sweet potato bed. However, the drip lines deliver more water due to the demand of cucumbers.
Sweet potatoes love water, but they are extremely resilient, and thrive in the heat.
Cucumbers are a bit more sensitive. The great thing about setting up these automatic drip lines is that you can customize the water delivery to your plants like we have done.
On both the towers and the raised beds, the Dripworks system app is customizable, and I adjust the watering based on what we are growing, and the time of year.
Bounty or Beauty? Yield and Maintenance Explored
It’s not just about the look or the setup. It’s also about the bounty. Raised beds are generous with their yields, giving plenty of room for roots to roam. Grow towers, on the other hand, while they may produce less soil volume per plant, make up for it in vertical volume, letting you grow more in less horizontal space.
The only issue is, towers require steady nutrient flow. We set up our plants with a nutrient delivery pump that mixes the water with the nutrients prior to delivering it to the plants.
Plant roots typically go down into your soil and fan out looking for the nutrients that it needs.
Due to the extremely sandy soil here in Florida, certain plants need a little more care and attention to detail. Although, with technology we can have all of our plants grow in the ground directly. Raised beds and grow towers have saved us so much yard space. Only our fence line, and back yard area close to the house have food growing. This is all we need.
The rest of the space is open for the children to play, or for us to use as we see fit. If we were to try and grow everything traditionally in the ground to get the yield that we are getting now, we would have to sacrifice a significant amount of our yard space.
The Deciding Dig
So, how do you choose? It boils down to your garden's geography, your back's willingness to bend, and your soul's aesthetic leanings. Do you yearn for the spread-out, bountiful harvest that raised beds promise? Or does the vertical allure of grow towers call to you, with their abundant layers and minimal footprint?
Although raised beds are above the ground, they still require a degree of bending down for maintenance and harvesting. The grow towers on the otherhand make harvesting the middle and upper level plants much easier.
Raised beds require less maintenance once set up is complete as discussed above. However, in our grow towers, we have to monitor for pests more often than the raised beds. This actually can be due to the type of plants that we are growing. Currently we are treating our grow towers with a neem oil spray to help get rid of bugs like aphids and whiteflies.
Although we see them in our raised beds, they are not as prevalent as we see in the towers. As the sun sets on our garden chat, remember this: whether you choose to elevate your ground level crops with raised beds or the compact towering method of grow towers, your garden will be a testament to your love for growth.
Both will flourish under the tender care of DripWorks' drip system, available here [DripWorks Referral Link](https://www.dripworks.com/?ref=ivj29hxt).
What's your take on the raised bed versus grow tower debate? Share your thoughts, and may your garden grow as endless as a summer day.
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And with that, our garden tale comes to an end... or perhaps, just begins. Whichever you choose, may your hands be dirty and your heart full. Happy gardening, till we meet again beneath the leaves.
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