Borders, Boxes and Beds, Oh My!

Borders give gardens a geometric quality that can be pleasing to the eye, and the options for materials range from very expensive to totally free!

There is something about a well-defined gardening space that just feels right, and certain choices in materials can even benefit the plants. In today's article, I would like to review the options available to gardeners and discuss the relative pros and cons that they lend to garden bed design.

The pegs and withies (blackberry canes used as rope) lend a real medieval feel to this border-bed. With this bed, I keep expecting a hobbit to pop out of the hillside at any moment!

What are defined gardening spaces?

When I think of backyard vegetable gardens in the 1970s when I was a kid, I think of big rectangles with a wooden borders around the perimeter to keep out grass and weeds from the lawn. Inside the perimeter the plants were grown in long rows, and there were walking paths between the rows.

Fast forward to the 2000s, and we have square-foot gardening, vertical gardening, raised beds, no-till gardens, permaculture gardens, bag gardens, container gardens, and on and on ad infinitum. Still, the goal has not changed: we want to make a good use of our available space, and grow delicious fresh vegetables. Today, there seems to be a growing appreciation for “defined spaces” in backyard gardens. What I mean by this term is the notion that a given area is dedicated to gardening, but then within that area, certain spaces are designated for growing, and everything else is designated for access (defined walking paths). This can be as simple as a series of raised beds, or like my garden, with many different spaces that evolved organically over time in an ad hoc fashion.

There are many benefits of defined garden spaces:

• they allow for more intensive use of available planting space

• they direct human traffic around the planting space, thereby greatly minimizing soil compaction

• they greatly facilitate a no-till approach to gardening

• they lend themselves to an organizational mentality and facilitate crop rotation

• they look really cool

So, with no further ado, let’s run through some options for defining gardening spaces. I'll start with the ones that cost money, and then move on to the inexpensive options that I prefer.