15 Raised Garden Bed Ideas

Discover different types of raised garden bed styles and get inspired to create your own.

By: Julie Martens Forney
Related To:
Garden Types Outdoor Rooms Raised Garden Vegetable Gardening

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Potager Raised Bed Design

A raised bed potager, or kitchen garden, showcases the orderly, formal design these beds can bring to a setting. Simple wood frames constructed from rot-resistant lumber provide years of growing success. Raised beds lend themselves to intensive gardening techniques, such as interplanting, succession planting and square-foot gardening.

Colorful Raised Bed

When raised beds are made from UV-stable polypropylene, they infuse a landscape with bold color year-round. Plastic beds provide long life and don’t rot like wood can. Just be sure to choose materials that are UV-stable to prevent rapid breakdown by sun exposure. This design features easy interlocking corners.

Woven Wicker Gives a Rustic English Garden Appearance

There are a variety of materials that can be used to build a raised garden bed, such as woven wicker, giving a rustic English garden appearance.

Stone Beds Last Forever

Stacked stones provide a long-lasting bed edging that doesn’t rot despite contact with wet soil. The stone absorbs heat and radiates it into soil inside the raised bed, allowing you to plant sooner in spring and let crops grow longer in fall.

Informal Stone Raised Bed

An informal stone raised bed design features individual boulders stacked and fitted to create a foundation for productive gardens. This mounded garden illustrates a type of raised bed known as hugelkultur (German for “hill culture”). Plants in hugelkultur raised beds reach mature size more quickly than in traditional planting beds and need very little watering.

Metal Gives a Modern Look

Metal raised beds blend artfully into a modern style landscape. Any metal is long-lasting and carefree, and this product features a steel product known as Zincalume, which lasts four times as long as galvanized steel. This particular design offers the beauty of curved edges that softens the hard look of corrugated metal.

Aim High With Beds

Tall raised beds can make a small yard seem larger by injecting vertical interest. Taller beds take the backache out of ongoing plant maintenance by eliminating the stooping necessary to tend in-ground beds.

Grow Up in Raised Beds

Use the frame of a raised bed as a construction platform to host a trellis, and you can stock your garden with climbing flowers or edibles, like snow peas. The frame of a raised bed provides multiple options for attaching accessory items, like a floating row cover, frost blanket or mesh fencing to deter animals.

Take a Seat

Red cedar makes a long-lasting contribution to a raised garden bed. This bed features a handy bench just the right height for perching on bed edges and tending plants in the garden. The bench offers a wide lip that hooks over the edge of the bed, providing stable seating. It’s also portable, small enough to pick up and carry to another spot along the raised bed edge.

Box Your Garden

Oversized red cedar boxes allow you to create a custom raised bed garden design. Five boxes of varying sizes come as part of a set. Arrange the planter boxes in a design that makes the best use of your growing area, sunlight or yard shape. Long-lasting cedar is rot-resistant, making an ideal material for raised bed planters.

A Bed of Straw

Use straw bales to create a raised bed that’s fully compostable. Straw beds bring a host of benefits to the landscape. They’re inexpensive and also offer a temporary bed solution. After the garden season ends, straw bales can easily be used as winter mulch or converted into layering material for creating a lasagna garden.

Trolley Garden Bed

Embrace pain-free gardening with a raised bed that’s tall enough to eliminate bending while tending. This elevated trolley garden offers an ample 12 square feet of growing area, including a deep enough pocket to host tall crops like tomatoes. Tuck shorter plants like leaf lettuce and radishes along bed edges.

Wall-Hugger Planter

The wall-hugging qualities of this planter make it a good choice for small space gardens, where every square inch needs to work hard. Tuck the wall vegetable trug along a wall or fence for an instant raised garden bed that’s tall enough to eliminate bending when planting or weeding. Plant taller crops toward the flat side of the planter and shorter ones toward the front.

Raised Bed Liner

When the only spot you have for situating a raised bed is on a patio, deck or driveway, keep soil from washing out by installing a liner inside the raised bed frame. This bed liner features a patented double polypropylene fabric that lets water drain while keeping soil in place. It makes a great choice for laying over existing poor soil or grassy areas. The liner also keeps grass from invading the bed.

Raised Bed Watering

Using soaker hoses in raised beds can be tricky. Typically parts of the hose wind up soaking footpaths as they snake throughout beds. A snip-n-drip soaker hose system lets you trim soaker hoses to the correct length for your raised beds. Once hoses are cut, snap fittings into place and turn the water on.

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