Bend Me, Shape Me, Any Way You Want Me

Your wonderful octagonal cedar raised garden bed draws oohs and ahs. The one minor problem: it doesn't attract enough sun and your plants are dying on the vine. What do you do?

Your garden may be the wrong shape, or you may have placed your plants at the wrong angles. When you're building raised beds, make note of where the sunlight falls. If, say, you install an arbor or a statue that blocks the sun, your task becomes how to build a raised garden without necessarily moving either the garden or the statue. You can re-shape that raised garden with a stackable stake system.

Building raised garden beds becomes easier if you can expand them or change the shape--though you may have to replant tomatoes and cucumbers in an area with more sun exposure. Once you have the directions on how to build raised bed gardens from a kit, you can alter that octagon to make it, say, a hexagon or a pentagon. Or perhaps you want a star shape, because your garden is the star of your backyard.

Now with the knowledge of how to adjust and how to build raised bed gardens, your vegetables can shine like the stars...thanks to proper sunlight.