Doing it yourself is in - after all, it can also be great fun and save money. Even with a herb bed made of wood, it is advisable to become active yourself. We will show you the advantages and provide you with useful tips.
A raised bed can be built from pallets, for example
Build a herb bed yourself - the advantages
In order to keep your own small spice and medicinal garden, simple cultivation outdoors does not always make sense. Especially if your garden does not offer a suitable place for it or you only have a balcony available. In this case, it makes sense to make a wooden box bed yourself. But a frame with subdivisions is also useful for separating herbs with different requirements from each other. A raised bed also has special plant-related and handling advantages.
So what speaks for building a box herb bed yourself:
- Mobility - free choice of location
- Possible segmentation of different herbs
- more influence on the substrate and easier management in raised beds
The box bed outdoors
If you have a suitable outdoor location for your herb bed, you can still structure it well with a wooden structure. It delimits the herb culture from the outside and can take into account the vegetative properties of the planned herbs with separate inner boxes. Varieties such as lemon balm or peppermint, which are particularly fast growing and spreading, can be kept in check.
In addition, the individual box segments can be filled with different soil mixtures - so you can cultivate herbs that need nutrients such as parsley, lemon verbena or tarragon and varieties that prefer lean soil such as thyme, rosemary or marjoram in a small space.
Of course, you can also leave such a functional box bed as a low, free-standing construction and not sink it into the open ground. Then it is a bit more conspicuous, but in case of doubt it is also mobile for site experiments or winter storage.
The herb raised bed
With the free-standing box bed, we are no longer far from the raised bed - only that the raised bed is even higher, as the name suggests, and thus offers further advantages.
On the one hand, this results in a comfortable working height - to provide even more comfort, you can attach side, surrounding bench surfaces with cross supports or legs screwed underneath to your wooden construction. For the care of the herb planting and the harvest, this can be very pleasant, especially for older people.
On the other hand, you can put together a deeper substrate in a raised bed construction - in this respect, a herb raised bed is particularly suitable for nutrient-demanding varieties such as chives, parsley, basil or lovage. With a herb raised bed made of wood, you also give the plants a relatively temperature-resistant and breathing soil climate.
Build it yourself - note the size
For a box bed at ground level, you should not estimate a width and length of more than 1.20 m. Otherwise access will be difficult. Boards about 40 cm high are suitable for the construction.
With a raised herb bed, you can of course go further with the edge length - as long as the depth still allows you to reach the herbs planted in the middle. The rule of thumb of a maximum of 1.20 m also applies here.