What are the best raised garden beds?
Using a raised garden bed is often the best choice for a thriving garden. If you can plant in the ground and succeed, then great. If you can’t for whatever reason (e.g., we have insane oak tree roots all through our entire yard), a raised garden bed makes it possible for you to plant things that might require more space than a pot or container can accommodate. Even better, you control the soil from (literally) the ground up. By filling the bed with whatever custom mix of compost and organic matter you want, you bypass whatever ratchet, sandy, nematode-ridden, or waterlogged soil you might be dealing with otherwise. In a raised bed, your crops can get perfect drainage and balanced fertility from day one, which means healthier roots, fewer disease headaches, and less annoyance with soil structure and nutrition.
What makes a good raised bed?
The most important factor is material. You’ll typically be able to choose between metal or wood beds. Whatever type you choose, you’ll want to choose durable, food-safe materials. For metal beds, that’s ideally galvanized steel. If the metal is coated/painted, make sure it’s done with a food-safe material (e.g., powder coated). If you go with wood, choose something like cedar, redwood, or modern ACQ-treated lumber. Despite the common objections to treated lumber, modern treated lumbers are completely safe for use in a raised bed. There are also a number of economical plastic bed options that are perfectly serviceable, but again, make sure it’s a food-safe plastic that won’t leech things into your crops in the heat.
The second thing you’ll want to consider is footprint. You’ll likely want the footprint narrow enough so that you never have to step on the soil, which means about four feet wide or less on at least one dimension. As for depth, twelve inches of depth serves most crops, but taller walls give tap-rooted veggies extra room and spare your back. Just keep in mind you also have to fill this thing with soil, so you don’t want to get something so deep or wide that you’re going to have a hard (or expensive) time filling it!
Can I just get the cheapest one?
Maybe, but you’ll want to watch out for a few things that cheap raised beds tend to fall into:
Bad materials – Ensure if you’re getting a metal bed, that it’s galvanized steel and not aluminum or “metal.” If you’re buying wood, make sure it’s cedar, redwood, or something treated for the outdoors rather than cheap untreated pine. If you’re buying plastic, make sure it’s HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene or #2 plastic) or polypropylene (#5 plastic). Otherwise, they can break down quickly rather than lasting a long time like they’re supposed to. Most beds should last something like 10 years with higher end options rated for 20 years.
Poor construction – Make sure to read reviews and look at the bed’s construction. Many cheaper options use screws that will rust out and fail or use some sort of seemingly fancy construction that ultimately will break down much more quickly. User reviews (at least the real ones) are typically a good way to discern which ones might suffer from some of these issues.
Deceptive sizing – Cheaper beds often times overstate their sizing or have edited/AI generated images that make them seem a lot bigger than they are. Nothing can describe the disappointment of ordering a raised bed, not paying attention to the listed size rather than the images, and then receiving something that’s much smaller than you anticipated. Make sure you measure and use the listed dimensions as your guide rather than the relative size to the trees or whatever are in the pictures!
Budget options
We’ve purchased a few of these options over the years and have had great results despite the lower prices:
Best Choice Products ($40 and up) – This is the best lower-priced brand that we’ve found to have reliably good products. We have some of the 1’ deep metal beds that are really affordable ($40 for a 4’ x 2’ x 1’) and some of their deeper 2’ metal beds as well. The construction and materials are good, and they have a ton of sizes available. Their wooden beds are decent, but the wood they use (Chinese fir) isn’t as long lasting cedar and friends.
2’ Round Beds from ZXZHFTY ($35 for one, $75 for three) – Yes, they’re a randomly generated Amazon brand name, but the product is actually really nice. These 2’ round metal beds are really nicely constructed and extremely affordable (a 3-pack is only $75). We have blueberry bushes, blackberry bushes, flowers, and several other things in these around the garden.
Plastic beds from Tigergarden ($26 for their smallest size, $30 for more common sizes) – These plastic planters are made of polypropylene and have held up nicely to the Florida sun and heat for us. We have 4 of their beds in a shadier area, and they’ve done great holding flowers, kale, and a few other crops. We’ve used their smallest size (3’ x 2’ x 1’) since larger/deeper beds won’t work where we needed them, but they have more common/larger sized beds as well.
The Cadillac of raised beds
If you’ve got a little more money to spend on raised beds, we can’t recommend these enough:
Vego Garden ($150 for 3.5’ x 5’ x 17”) – Vego is our default when we’re shopping for metal raised beds. The metal they use is really thick, beautifully coated, and nicely shaped (i.e., no sharp edges), and the beds are easy to assemble. They have a bunch of whiz-bang addons that we don’t buy, but some of their accessories are really useful. We have a ton of their solar garden lights ($50 for a 4 pack) on all of our beds (Vego brand or not), and their trellises (while pricey) are built like a tank and easy to put together. They sell kits that can be built in several configurations, and the really nice thing is if you wanted to go rogue, they sell add-on panels on their website so you could build a much bigger bed from a single kit if desired.
Epic Gardening ($99 for a 4’ x 3’ x 15”) – We haven’t had a chance to personally test these beds out, but friends rave about them. The slightly lower price point for a seemingly comparable product to Vego is a win, but they don’t have quite as many options available in terms of size and colors. Even so, they seem to be another really solidly built option to think about!
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