How to Plant a Garden that Takes Five Minutes or Less to Weed

I think I'm like most gardeners; I love gardening and hate weeding. Fortunately, I've found the secret to having a large, highly productive garden that can be weeded in five minutes or less without using chemicals.

It's worked so well, that I plan to never have a traditional garden again. It took a tiny bit of extra work up front, but the hours of weeding it has saved are more than worth it.

So how did I do it? With carefully planned raised beds.

Because this was an experiment, I used scrap untreated pine lumber. The beds I built this time will probably only last another season or two. But it was an inexpensive way to find out if raised bed gardening was for me. Later on I will probably invest a little more money and build cedar beds that will last for many, many years. In the meanwhile, I couldn't be happier with my inexpensive pine-framed garden beds.

To start, I went to the lumber store and checked out the scrap lumber bin. I got lucky, and found several four and six foot lengths of untreated pine 2x6 boards. I purchased about twenty of them for 50 cents each. Even if you have to purchase your lumber from the regular stacks, if you want to start with pine, the boards are only about three dollars each. For around $30 you can get enough to build several pine gardening beds. Cedar boards are a little more expensive, but will last for around 10 years, much longer than the pine-framed beds. So if you know you're going to keep the raised beds, it's worth splurging for the cedar boards.

I then built several four foot by six foot beds by simply screwing the boards together - six foot boards on the sides, and four foot boards on the ends. If you're making cedar beds that you want to last longer, they sell metal braces at the hardware store that are made just for connecting boards at the corners.

I then tilled several four foot by six foot areas in my garden. I had built five bed frames, so I tilled five spots. One mistake I made was putting the beds too close to each other. I left only two feet between beds. Based on experience, I recommend three to four feet between them if you have the space to do it.

After tilling, I placed the pine frame beds over the tilled areas. Then I mixed together garden soil and organic fertilizers that I had already purchased, along with composted leaves from last fall and some fine cedar mulch. I filled each framed bed with the mixture, combining it as much as possible with the tilled soil from below. I purposely left the soil loose and did not compact it at all, to leave more room for growing plants.

Finally, I simply soaked the beds and planted my seeds.

Around and between the beds, I laid garden fabric to prevent weeds from growing in the areas outside the boxes. I topped the fabric with gravel, but that's not necessary if you stake the fabric down.

The results were fantastic. In a small space I am growing a large crop of corn, peas, beans, squash, radishes, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, cantaloupes, watermelon, pumpkins and strawberries.

As for the weeds, I can weed each bed in less than 60 seconds. The weeds are quickly obvious, and because the soil is so loose, they are easy to pull. Because I purchased soil to fill the boxes with, there weren't nearly as many weed seeds in the soil to begin with. It's amazingly easy to keep up on the weeds before they have a chance to really get growing. With my previous traditional garden I spent at least an hour and a half each week weeding. Now I can spend my time enjoying my garden instead of weeding it.