How Many Raised Beds Do You Need? Simple Ways to Figure it Out
Raised beds bring the opportunity for abundant yields while solving challenging garden situations. If you’re starting fresh or expanding to include raised beds, garden expert Katherine Rowe offers guidelines to determine how many you need to fulfill your garden goals throughout the seasons.

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Raised beds offer many advantages to gardening in challenging sites, including small spaces, poor soils, inadequate drainage, and areas with no soil at all. They offer a streamlined way to grow fruits, vegetables, herbs, and ornamentals, using efficient planting to maximize space for greater yields.
Raised beds also provide accessible options with elevated planting, harvesting, and tending. They make weed control more manageable and create functional growing spaces in any location, from sun to shade.
Figuring out your number of raised beds requires simple planning, but the process is straightforward and rewarding as you curate new growing zones. With a bit of preparation, the beds will be full and productive in no time.
Large Cedar Raised Bed

Large Cedar Raised Bed 47″ x 91″ x 15″
- Natural longevity
- Convenient top-sill
- Deep 15″ volume for root space
- Easy assembly
Factors to Consider

In determining how many raised beds to install, first consider your overall garden goals.
Goals may include:
- Growing for self-sufficiency
- For a market
- To supplement fresh produce
- For specific culinary favorites
- For cut flowers or ornamentals to draw pollinators
The ideas are endless and important to hone in on as you plan your structures. Consider materials and maintenance as you weigh how many to install. While the bountiful harvest increases with more beds, so does time spent tending.
Goals

Many of us grow vegetables to supplement our daily diet. We enjoy the fresh flavor, nutrition, diversity of varieties, sustainability of growing our own, and much more. You may intend to homestead and increase self-sufficiency or merely add some favorites to the daily dish. If you’re just starting or incorporating raised beds into your in-ground setup, one or two may be all you need to get going as you determine gardening preferences.
A conservative estimate of the square footage needed to feed an individual year-round is 200 square feet. To feed a family of four, you may need anywhere from 800-1200 square feet of growing area. This varies depending on individual preferences and eating habits; it can be a loose reference as we create and add to raised bed growing.
Using this general guideline, you can visualize how much square footage you want to devote to production. It would take about eight beds, four feet wide by six feet long, to fulfill 200 square feet of growing area. A lot of us don’t have this space, and that’s okay. Raised beds let us produce across scales. Get creative with containers, hanging baskets, and in-ground plantings, too, as they work for your site.
Location and Scale

Often, available space drives our planting options. Whether your space is small or expansive, two primary factors to consider when placing raised beds are sunlight exposure and access to a water source.
Many herbs, vegetables, and flowering plants prefer full sun, with at least six hours of daily sunlight for best growth. Morning sun is ideal, and, depending on your climate, light afternoon shade or dappled light may help protect leaves from scorching in direct afternoon rays.
Access to water is critical, as raised beds dry out more quickly than ground soil. An advantage is that soils are workable earlier in the season, warming faster and without prolonged saturation. Whether using a hose to hand water or relying on installed raised bed irrigation, connecting to an accessible water source is key.
Another consideration in raised bed placement is sheltering plants from strong winds, which can topple taller stems and cause them to dry out more quickly. Also, plan how you’ll move about the space if you incorporate more than one raised bed. Preparing the ground, leveling the site, and allowing sufficient pathways make accessing the beds and hauling materials easier.
Configure Bed Dimensions

Sizing the beds is important in layout and maximizing space. Use dimension guidelines to create a plan. As they relate to the size of the site, beds can be any length. Width is important for accessibility. Four feet wide works for keeping plants within arm’s reach from all sides. Go more narrow if only one side is accessible. Reachability makes harvesting, tending, and planting easy and avoids the need to step on healthy roots and soils.
Soil depth is important for root development. A minimum of six inches is suitable for most annual flowers and herbs. Other vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, etc.) and perennials benefit from more root space. Between 18 to 24 inches is ideal. Anything shallower than 12 inches is not recommended.
Grow Your Favorites

It helps to have an idea of what you want to grow when choosing how many beds you need. Choosing varieties that bring the most enjoyment is best for precious growing real estate. It’s so tempting to grow a wide array of varieties or entire seed packets, but narrowing down the selection to what you’ll use is advantageous in getting the most from your crops. Go for new or intriguing selections, too, but rely mostly on favorites you’re likely to eat or use.
Opt for those with the same cultural conditions to grow together. Companion plants are beneficial, as are flowering perennials and annuals, to attract pollinators and beneficial insects.
Be selective, focus on what you love, and grow multiples of these to optimize the harvest rather than a vast cross-section. And leave a little room to check out new varieties and heirlooms in addition to tried and true favorites.
Use a Garden Planning Tool

Epic Garden’s Garden Planner makes it easy to figure out how many raised beds you need based on your goals and desired crops. It accounts for site considerations like bed size and mixed arrangements (containers, support structures).
Simply draw up your raised beds, select plants, and move them around to decide your layout. It allows full creativity while taking the guesswork out of scale and plant spacing.
The tool also takes location and growing zone into account to suggest selections and offers a planning calendar on when to sow, transplant, and harvest. Play with support structures to get a feel for placement, expanding the growing dimension vertically.
Plan on Paper

A plan on paper or a simple sketch is a valuable tool to guide overall structure and layout. Create a scale that works for you, measuring the site and drawing out your beds. The goal is to take the size of your site into account, determine your growing arrangement, and then get to the detailed plant layout layer.
Use a piece of graph paper to make scaling easy, where one gridded square on the page equals one square foot of the site. Measure and draw the planting area accordingly. Then, add plants, too. These basic calculations and map view show how many crops you can fit in your arrangement. Use plant spacing recommendations for your selected crops as a guide for placement in the beds.
Maximize Space

One of the big advantages of incorporating raised beds is their ability to pack a lot of plants while providing healthy spacing and root development. Use vertical growing structures and space-saving arrangements to fill each bed efficiently. Successional planting, too, allows a second round of infill crops as other seasonals fade.
Add Vertical Structures

Vertical planting maximizes available space. Growing plants upright on support structures takes advantage of height while minimizing spread. Go vertical with trellises, arches, streamlined growing structures, and staking. Whether growing in upright planters or along arches and trellises, vertical plants add interest and dimension to the layout. Growing vines like cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, peas, and beans on upright supports is space-saving because it prevents them from sprawling over the ground.
Lifting leaves and stems off the ground also helps in disease prevention by improving air circulation and reducing crowded, damp conditions. Less irrigation splashing on leaves and a faster dry time ensure that fungal diseases are less likely to take hold.
Upright supports expand the ability to grow climbing vines and sprawling crops in small areas, and they provide access to sunlight: Lifting plants increases light exposure for all-around even growth.
Square-Foot Gardening

Streamlined techniques like square-foot gardening maximize growing space efficiently. They take advantage of a raised bed’s ability to pack more plants for abundant yields than traditional row systems. If you’re new to above-ground beds or just want to organize them efficiently, take a look at the method that divides the bed into uniform square-foot sections.
Based on spacing requirements, each square foot holds multiple or individual seedlings (depending on variety). For example, multiple lettuce, chives, and carrots fit into a single square foot, while a singular tomato or pepper fits one to two others. Combination planting accounts for dense growth while reducing overcrowding.