Not too much in gardening bugs me as much as poor drainage for my plants. A few of the plants we have can handle a water situation but most of them just give up treading water and drown. It’s a learning curve to know which plants are going to lap it up and blossom beautifully and which plants won’t. I tend to be one of those people that reads the instructions when what I think will work doesn’t. It’s all part of learning to be a gardener.

Alright you don’t want to be like me so let me tell you how you can test your ground to see how it handles water. Start by digging a hole about 10 inches to a foot deep and about 8 inches across. Now go get some water and fill that hole to the top. Leave that for about a day and then fill it again. By the way if it still has water in it you have a problem, if not let’s see how much of that water is gone in 8 or 10 hours. If you still have water you do have a drainage problem and your soil will hold too much water for some plants.

We tried a few things to make the soil drain a little better, like making trenches to drain the water away but that didn’t do much of a job as our garden is fairly level and the water still didn’t drain away. Then we tried to create raised planting beds and that was the trick that saved us time, money and plants of course.

We created the raised beds so they were at least 5 to 8 inches deep and using the right combination of compost to existing soil we had a winner and our drainage problem was pretty much under control. The great thing about it is how nice the raised beds look. It makes our garden look kinda professional now and people make nice comments, where before there just wasn’t anything to comment on.

Give raised planting beds a try and I am sure you will never go back.