Austin gardeners design raised beds to create an accessible, well drained area of healthy soil for growing vegetables.

Austin gardeners are a hardy bunch. 

No matter how many times they get hit by scorching summers, winters that are intermittently cold and warm, and extreme periods of way too much rain or way too little rain, they keep on digging and planting. If they're west of MoPac Boulevard, they're often gardening on slabs of limestone covered in a few inches of rubble, mixed with a tiny bit of topsoil. If they're east, they're likely digging in deep black clay that's hard as a rock when it's dry and a sticky blob when it's wet. 

It's no surprise that many Austin gardeners opt for raised beds as a way to create an accessible, well-drained area of healthy soil for growing vegetables. 

A raised vegetable bed can be a simple and practical thing: 

Dig at least 6 inches (12 inches if possible) into your existing soil, mix in a bunch of good quality compost, and shape the improved soil into a mound (or several mounds) about 5 to 6 inches high. Voila. A raised bed. 

Or it can be a less simple thing: 

Using rocks, bricks, 2-by-6 boards, cinder blocks or wire fencing, create an enclosure. You can make it round, square or whatever shape you like. Keep in mind that you want to be able to reach your vegetables without walking all over the planting area, so it's best to keep the bed fairly narrow or plan to create paths to the hard-to-reach areas. Cover the ground inside your enclosure with several layers of newspaper or one layer of overlapping pieces of cardboard. Then fill with a mix of good quality garden soil and compost. If you want to create your own rich, crumbly garden soil, try a layered or sheet-composting approach. On top of the first layer of paper, alternate layers of dead leaves or straw with thin layers of good quality compost, decomposed granite, composted poultry manure, and finally, as a top layer, a couple of inches of garden soil. Water it and let it "cook," or decompose, for a couple of months before planting. If you're in a bigger hurry than that, mix compost into your garden soil layer and make it a couple of inchesww deeper for immediate planting. 

It can also be a thing of whimsy and imagination: 

Have some fun and experience your inner artist or inner handyman. Try this: Sink upside down wine bottles in the ground side by side to create your edging, then use wine corks as mulch (but not the plastic kind). Or create your own distinctive look by edging your beds with homemade cement blocks embedded with vintage glass beads or found objects. The possibilities are endless. Keep in mind that you don't want your soil to come into contact with anything that contains lead or other toxins. 

If you're not sure what you want your raised beds to look like, get out and look at what other gardeners are doing. 

Eastside Cafe, 2113 Manor Road, is one of my favorite places to borrow (OK, steal) gardening ideas. Co-owner and chief gardener Dorsey Barger works hard to keep her inner city organic garden healthy and productive year-round. Her garden features more than a dozen raised beds in many shapes and sizes that make use of all sorts of edging materials. (She has a little more incentive than the average gardener: Her produce is featured in the popular restaurant's daily specials.) 

One of the more whimsical raised beds is the bed within a bed design. Cinder blocks are stacked on their sides (with holes facing up) to form a rectangular box. The enclosure and the cinder block holes are filled with soil. An antique bed frame placed on top of the bed completes the look. For a more pared-down version of this design, she simply lays a single layer of cinder blocks in a rectangle and fills the space and the cinder block holes with soil. Very simple, and without the antique bed, fairly cheap. 

One of my favorite simple raised bed designs at Eastside Cafe (and the one I'm planning to try) is a hogwire enclosure lined with pine needles and then filled with soil. The wire is sunk a few inches into the ground. Plastic tubing stretched across the bed and attached to the fencing provides a quick and easy support for shade cover or frost cover, depending on the season. 

Barger likes to fill her beds with a growing mix made from her own homemade compost combined with the Natural Gardener's Hill Country Garden Soil. Her compost is made from the restaurant's vegetable scraps mixed with dry leaves. 

While I was talking to Barger, Eastside Cafe co-owner Elaine Martin strolled out to show us what she had just created: a beautiful plate of grilled baby beets (with tender tops still attached) and jalape?o pesto shrimp on a bed of lettuce greens. Martin was trying to develop a dish that would make use of the beet seedlings Barger was thinning from one of the raised beds. She said it was still a work in progress, but one bite was enough for me to know that Martin is onto something really good.