Why Martha Stewart Changed Her Veggie Gardening Method and You Should Too

Gardening on raised beds offers more versatility.

Martha Stewart is the queen of many things: cooking, baking, decorating, aging with style, being best friends with Snoop Dogg, and, of course, gardening. She has written books on gardening and consistently notes that April is a great month for getting to work on your vegetable garden.

“My large new vegetable garden is so much fun to visit right now because of all the growing produce—here’s something new popping up every day,” Stewart wrote in her blog in 2023.

She has been known to grow her vegetables in the ground but, as part of a 2024 Miracle-Gro event to introduce the new Miracle-Gro Organic Raised Bed & Garden Soil, she noted that there’s a different method that might work even better: raised garden beds. She said the raised beds keep her vegetables organized and prevent over-planting, which can cause some vegetables to overshadow others.

“Last year, I changed my whole attitude towards vegetable gardening,” Stewart said at the event. “I'm not going to eat more than a cabbage a week...so, don't plant anymore. Plant something else.”

She, with the help of her head gardener Ryan McCallister, planted vegetables in 56 large raised beds, according to Stewart’s website.

“We had artichokes in a month and a half. We had 10-pound cabbages within two months. I couldn't believe what was happening in this garden,” Stewart said. “We had a crop of asparagus the first year—you never have that. They tell you to wait three years before those roots will produce asparagus.”

Raised beds can be a bit of a learning curve to set up. You either have to buy them pre-built or build them yourself, and there are a few things you need to consider when gardening with them that you might not consider when you garden directly into the ground.

First, you’ll need to choose the right location with at least six to eight hours of direct sunlight every day. Make sure your raised beds have enough drainage and that you fill the beds with high-quality soil.

You want the beds large enough to give your vegetables room to grow but small enough that they’re manageable—a good size is no wider than four feet and about 12 to 24 inches tall, so you can reach everything in the bed without having to compact the soil.

Just like growing in the dirt, you can install a drip irrigation system to ensure your plants get enough moisture, or just make sure you water them deeply enough—that drainage will come in handy to stop them from getting waterlogged.

There are even some raised beds that have wheels on them, so you can move them into the garage or another covered area to extend the season of growth and give yourself a longer harvest period.

No matter how you grow your vegetables, Stewart has the keys.

Read Next: 32 Raised Garden Bed Design Ideas

Read the original article on The Spruce.