Are raised beds worth the effort and expense? The simple answer is yes, and here are a few reasons to make room in your landscape:
• Raised beds give the gardener an opportunity to control key factors such as soil make up, drainage and sun exposure.
• No foot traffic through your raised beds means less compacted soil.
• Plants thrive when their roots can travel freely.
• A bed that is raised even a foot can avoid many of our region’s pesky weeds. When the bed is fallow, a barrier of newspaper or plastic can add extra weed prevention.
• A raised bed constructed at seat level can reduce the amount of stretching needed to tend it.
• Heat gain that a raised bed receives provides a longer growing season; visqueen or glass extends the season.

Raised beds come in many forms, with a wide range of cost and materials:
• Mounding of garden soil can outperform a traditional ground level planting area.
• A rockery or a stacked stone wall can be inexpensive and attractive if built well, but maintenance can be an issue. Rough rocks are not usually comfortable seats.
• Segmented rock walls can be a more expensive, with a range of sizes and colors, and involve straightforward installation. Capped walls can be very comfortable seats.
• Cedar raised beds are very common. Cedar is naturally decay and insect resistant and readily available.
• Pressure treated lumber can be used for raised bed walls. Even though treated wood will have a long life, its use around raised vegetable beds is controversial due to the possibility of chemical leeching into the soil and vegetables. (My raised beds are pressure treated 2 x 8’s that were once deck joists. When constructing my beds, I lined the inside of the walls with a resilient plastic liner, protecting my food (and me) from any unwanted leeched chemicals.)
• Poured concrete raised beds are an expensive but very long lasting option.
• Other materials that have been used to form raised beds include concrete board (Hardie Plank), plastic/composite lumber (Trex, TimberTech, Monarch), and formed steel. Winter is the season that few think about landscaping and gardening but it is a great time to prepare for spring. A raised bed that is installed early has time for composting and other important soil building amendments. Put the effort in now, avoid the rush of building, planning and planting all at once. Leave a little time to contemplate and reflect, how does one prepare parsnips? Bok choi?

Zach

Combined Sewer Storm Water Systems may seem an unlikely topic for a landscape blog.  I believe an understanding of the way storm water and sewerage are disposed of in Seattle (through the same pipes), leads to an opportunity for home owners.  Water that runs off our streets and roofs into storm drains, it contains chemicals and bacteria.  Puget Sound cities often collect this water and route it to a combined sewer/storm water water treatment system before it is released into rivers or the Puget Sound.  During heavy storms in the Seattle area, the system becomes over loaded and untreated sewage flows into Lake Washington and Puget Sound.

Seattle has initiated a campaign to detach building downspouts from the water treatment system and, where suitable, divert the water into rain gardens and cisterns where it can infiltrate into the ground, or retained until the storm subsides.  This Seattle initiative creates an opportunity – homeowners may help protect our waterways and to enhance their landscape.

Starting in Ballard, but eventually extending to other catchments, Seattle Public Utilities is setting up a subsidy program to encourage homeowners to detach their downspouts and route storm water to cisterns and/or rain gardens in their yards.  These cisterns and rain gardens are ‘storm water treatment facilities’.  If you should decide to pursue this idea, and receive the subsidy, you will need to follow a relatively simple permitting process, commit to maintain the system for at least five years.   Lifestyle Landscapes is trained to the permitting and installation processes.  With our designers help, you will end up with a new rain garden and the knowledge you have helped clean up Puget Sound and Lake Washington.  In the long term, you will have increased the value of your property by enhancing its green credentials.

Irrespective of whether your home is eligible for this Seattle based program, installing a rain garden will enhance your property and improving the environment.

Baxter

Peter Kahn is an environmental psychologist at the University of Washington.  Kahn has done extensive cross-cultural studies of children’s values and attitudes about open space and animal life and forests and plants and water—and the degradation and disappearance of all these things. He believes that, with every generation, kids are lowering their knowledge and expectations for what is a normal interaction with nature—creating a kind of generational amnesia about the natural world.  If nature is indeed a source of mental and emotional replenishment, this could emerge as one of the most compelling psychological issues of the not-so-faraway future.

There are great benefits for ourselves and our children when we have a connection to nature.  Here is a list of just some of the benefits:

• Decrease stress
• Stimulate healing
• People develop deeper more enduring relationships
• People become more generous
• We experience a greater sense of joy
• We experience a greater sense of peace
• Greater sense of well being

A simple beginning to introduce our children to nature:

• Become a nature watcher ourselves.
• Have unstructured time to walk in a park even in the rain and wind.
• Look for birds, bugs, any wildlife.
• Observe the sky.
• Pick a plant in your yard and take a look at the changes that occur each month for a year.
• Plant something, tend it, observe it, and harvest.
• Get a subscription for your children to a nature magazine:
  Your Big Backyard for ages 3-7
  Ranger Rick for ages 8-12

The mind needs nature and even a little bit can be a big help.

Arlene