The Advantages of Using Garden Boxes

The Advantages of Using Garden Boxes

Garden box ideas are everywhere, and much of their popularity lies in their practicality.  If you haven’t considered using garden boxes before, maybe learning about some of their benefits will give you something worth thinking about.  Let’s look at some of their benefits, and how they may help you to be more productive while spending less time, energy and resources on growing your crops.

Fragmentation

One of the biggest advantages of garden boxes is that you are creating specific, isolated areas to grow a single or group of compatible crops.  This makes everything from soil preparation to planting, feeding, watering, tending and harvesting the crops much easier.  You can tailor each section to meet the needs of the crop you are growing.  You can isolate problems such as weed-growth, insect and vermin problems since many infestations target a narrow range of plants. 

Organization

You can arrange crops by section and build that into your ongoing maintenance and planning.  This will help you to be more productive with your time while also ensuring that each crop is being tended to properly.  It’s very easy to look at a large garden as one “thing” that should be watered and pruned once in a while.  Using boxes makes it easier to manage each crop as effectively as possible.

Working

Each crop has different growing periods, different nutritional requirements and various other needs that are unique to them.  You can isolate problems, find solutions and minimize the impact of having problems with one crop spread to the rest of the garden.  Boxes also give you easier access to plants as opposed to climbing gingerly through your garden.  They are also raised which makes working on them easier on the back.

Building

You have tremendous flexibility in terms of how to build box gardens.  You can make them large enough to cover huge sections of your back yard, or you can make small boxes for a greenhouse or a tiered-growing system.   All you need is some lumber, or any material to be honest, in order to build boxes or sections.  People have used everything from pieces of plastic or containers with the bottoms removed to old tires to create garden boxes.  In other words, you can use almost anything that you have laying around in order to make a dedicated growing area for a particular plant or crop.

Planning

Anyone who is serious about creating a self-sufficient garden should incorporate boxes into their design plans.  You can make the best use of your space, create customized boxes based on demand or grow schedules, and work less while producing more.  The trick is to sketch out some different possibilities that will account for your overall food needs and growing environment. 

Once you know how much you are going to grow in this box or that box, then you can start planning on how much soil, nutrients, water and upkeep each section or crop will need.  However, at the end of the day, boxes can help you to bring the general idea of the garden down into smaller pieces that are easier to manage. 

Garden boxes represent some of the most beneficial, yet under-utilized solutions for homesteading and self-sufficiency.  Learn more about how you can incorporate them into your plans, and you can dramatically improve your ability to produce your own food with less effort than you may think.