The Benefits of Planting in Beds

Arranging your garden into beds has many benefits. First, it allows you to create larger blocks of plants spaced perfectly apart in shorter rows. This creates a “living mulch” that discourages weeds, retains soil moisture, and lessens soil compaction and erosion. Second, arranging your garden in beds gives you the freedom and extra space to create wider, more user-friendly paths. Finally, and most importantly, it’s MUCH better for your plants!

Large Blocks of Perfectly-Spaced Plants Create a Living Mulch

Discourages Weeds

As your plants grow bigger, they increasingly shade out the weeds. Once their foliage touches, they form a solid block, providing a wonderful “living mulch” that completely shades everything underneath, significantly discouraging the weeds.

Retains Soil Moisture

The shade provided by this “living mulch” also keeps the soil from drying in the direct sun, keeping it moist and lessening the need for added water.

Lessens Soil Compaction and Erosion

As plants get bigger, their foliage also absorbs the impact of raindrops over an ever-larger area. Although they seem small, raindrops compact bare soil a little more with each impact, and their cumulative effect can be quite significant (see sidebar). Plus, bare soil erodes much more readily. Heavy rain, therefore, can do much damage.

Hitting the plants’ foliage first, instead of the soil, however, softens these blows, spreading the rain into mists, trickles, and light drops, helping to keep the soil from compacting and eroding. Many plants also construct themselves, once mature, to funnel water where they most desire it (observe broccoli the next time you water). Not that they don’t also want wetted soil throughout their entire, large growing area, it’s just that their root density increases as it goes toward the center of the plant. A block of foliage with leaves of mature plants barely touching, therefore, allows the plants to direct the rainwater where they most want and need it.

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Sidebar: Water Pressure
Water droplets, whether from rain or the end of a hose, are a significant cause of soil compaction. In an untrammeled garden bed, they’re likely your number one cause of soil compaction. This is why many watering designs, like the Haws watering cans starting in 1866 and an increasing number of hose-end “sprayers” today, are designed to first direct the water droplets upward when leaving the spout or hose, greatly lessening their pressure and distance fallen and, hence, and their impact on the soil when they hit it.

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Allows More User-Friendly Paths

Another benefit of planting in beds is that it allows you to make your paths more comfortable. Take the awkward, foot-wide paths from next to your two rows of carrots and two rows of lettuce, combine them into one two-to-three foot path, and you’ll have a more comfortable walking area that’s more user-friendly for trucking through with garden tools, supplies, and wheelbarrows—and you’ll still have more usable planting space and not be constantly walking on your plants’ roots. 

Gives More of Your Plants an Expansive Root Area

As you might expect having learned the massive extent of many plants’ roots, in our garden, we notice that the plants near the paths tend to be the smallest and the weakest. The ones toward the middle of the bed—getting to spread their roots in all directions without a big compacted area as their border—are much stronger and larger. Imagine us with our plants in rows. Since we’d only have plants next to paths, we’d think the size of plants we now have on the edges of our beds were the normal maximum. Ouch!