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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

> And not that I wouldn't like waist high stone lined beds.  That  
> would be a
> lot of fun to garden.

Building stone beds consumes a huge amount of time. I spent about a  
year of intermittent work on the Christina Garden. It is so time- 
consuming that I could not sustain constant work on it for all the  
other opportunities crying for attention. A stone walls also takes up  
a lot of room and unless it is backed by reinforced concrete is  
subject to breaking from frost, hydrostatic pressure or being thumped  
by a runaway tractor. All that said, the reward is its beauty and  
permanence.

I will build most future garden beds of ferrocement. The greatest  
challenge is tying the poultry mesh together so I am designing in my  
mind ways to do it more easily. Ferrocement garden bed walls are  
superior to stone because they are much thinner, much stronger and go  
up much faster.  Ferrocement is very strong and can easily be tied  
across the width of the bed, making it nigh impossible for walls to  
ever lean. Actually, I want mine to purposely lean outward, the  
better to get my toes against them and thus be able to more easily  
reach across. Another design advantage to ferrocement is the ease of  
adding sockets or braces to support various trellis or mini-hoophouse  
structures.

It needs to be said that there is a disadvantage of raised beds. The  
higher the bed is built, the more irrigation is needed due to  
increased drainage. Thus, as walls rise in height, it becomes ever  
more imperative to build and maintain soil of high organic content.