It’s late spring and the itch to plant vegetables may be pulling you to the garden, but where do you start? Maybe this year you will choose to make a bigger commitment to gardening by installing raised beds.

Some people garden in used wine barrels or storebought containers, a good option if you don’t have much ground. But even in containers, you still need to provide plants with well draining, enriched soil. 

In raised beds and containers, you can control the quality of the soil, improving it to make it easy for plants to grow. You don’t have to get on your knees to work in raised beds, and the soil in raised beds warms up sooner.

Select the materials for your raised beds carefully. With luck, you will be gardening in them for a long time. Garden catalogs offer ridged plastic kits for making beds that are easy to move, a smart choice if you are not sure where the best spot in your yard is.

Most beds are built from 2 by 12 inch redwood planks. The redwood will last several years before it needs to be replaced. Some people have used redwood that has been pressure treated with chemicals to make it last longer. The jury is still out on whether this is a good idea for vegetable gardens.

A plastic material that resembles wood is also available for raised beds. It will outlast wood, but it is more expensive. I have seen attractive beds built from    4 by 4 and 6 by 6 posts. Another choice is cinder blocks.

When I decided to put in raised beds, I priced several different materials and chose the cinder blocks. I had set up beds originally using one row of cinder blocks. But I had not leveled the ground properly, and so my blocks were not level. But the soil inside was very good.      

I enlisted a helper to remove the blocks and push the existing soil to the middle of the bed. Then my helper built the beds three blocks high, cementing them in place but  leaving every other hole in the blocks empty to be filled with soil later. We made sure not to make the beds any wider than I can easily reach across.  

Once the blocks were in place, the soil inside was spread to the edges. New topsoil and compost were added in alternate layers, along with dried leaves, worm castings and chicken manure.  

I began watering every few days so the soil would settle and the critters in the soil would start decomposing the organic matter. As the soil settled, I added layers of the same materials. It took about three weeks for the soil to settle fully and become stable. All the open holes in the blocks were filled with soil, watered and tamped with a piece of rebar to make sure there were no air pockets. Now my garden was ready to plant.

In raised beds such as these, the soil level of the beds drops as worms and other soil microorganisms compost the layers, so you should expect to add soil and compost periodically. In my garden, nature had some help from the moles, who left little reminders that they had visited the bottom of the beds during the night.   

Some people try to foil moles by placing hardware cloth on the bottom of the bed and tacking it to the sides before putting soil in. I chose not to bother with this as gophers and moles sometimes simply go over the top of the beds and down into the soil. 

Last summer was the test of my new raised beds, and I was very proud of my produce.  

Napa County Master Gardeners answer questions Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 9 a.m. to noon, at the UC Cooperative Extension office, 1710 Soscol Ave., Suite 4 Call 253-4221, or toll-free at (877) 279-3065 for information or visit http://cenapa.ucdavis.edu