When learning how to build raised garden vegetable beds you need to know a few things before you drag out the hammer. What is your soil like? Does your soil drain fast? How much sun do you have? Which vegetables are you going to plant? How convenient is the garden location to your kitchen?

Vegetables require a lot of sun, fertile well drained soil, and hard work. The main reason people grow in raised beds is that they have poor soil or slow draining soil. When you make a raised bed you are adding good soil to on top of your native soil, which corrects both problems.

Location is the first thing you need to look at. When growing vegetables you want the vegetables to be convenient to the kitchen. No one wants to walk to the back of the lot to pull a carrot. Try to get your garden as close as you can to the kitchen door.

How sunny is your garden? The more sun you have the better. Go out to your potential gardening spot once per hour and see if it is getting sun for most of the day. If you are just getting a few hours of sun per day you need to find a new spot. Find a spot that gets more than 5 hours of direct sun per day. The more filtered your sunlight is the more hours of sun your vegetables will need.

Can you get to your garden from all four sides? If you cannot access your garden from all four sides you will need paths or a very narrow garden. You need to be able to weed your garden as the season progresses and if you have to walk on the soil to do this you are going to compact your beautiful soil and make it harder to work.

If you are planning to grow root crops your soil will need to be much lighter, add sand or perlite to your garden soil so the root crops can penetrate the soil and grow larger. Root crops in heavy clay soil will end up stubby or deformed.

Certain vegetables need more or less space so you need to adjust the size of your raised bed accordingly. If you are planning to grow radishes you need very little space, plant corn or watermelon and you need a lot of room for them to grow.  Do a little vegetable garden planning and things go so much easier later.

If you are planning to grow your vegetables from seed you need about 2 inches of fine soil for the seeds have the best germination. If you are going to buy and transplant plants into your garden the soil can be coarser.

Raised garden beds are the easiest gardens to work with once you have everything set up. The set up process can be a little difficult but it is worth the effort that you put into it.

Now that we have the perfect location for our garden we can buy the soil for our raised garden vegetable beds.