Haven't tried it, but raising the bed a bit, or making a mound, basically ensures drainage without doing that sort of stuff. You don't even need sides for a raised bed. Just make a hump, and amend the soil.

A simple test to deterine if your soil is well drained is to dig a hole 1 foot square and 1 foot deep and fill that with water and allow it to drain. Refill that hole with water and time how long it takes to drain this time. If that is longer than around 6 hours your soil may need to be "fixed". A quick, but expensive, way to do that is with drain pipes providing you have a place for the water to flow to. Better is to amend the soil with lots of organic matter so the Soil Food Web solves the drainage problem for you.

Just wanted to throw in my .02 after growing watermelon myself this year for the first time. I simply mounded composted manure (mixed with a bit of soil) nice and high (about a foot) on the planting area and sowed the seeds. I found this worked very well and I had wonderfully sweet watermelon. No problems with drainage at all and my soil tends to be clay-ish. Good luck.

Firefly

Any bermed, mounded or raised planting bed will offer improved drainage over flat ground - it's just the physics of soil.

kimmsr, you might want to check your sources on that home drainage test :-) While the time period in question does fluctuate some depending on who is presenting it, generally good or 'sharp' drainage is represented by a hole that drains in under an hour, average drainage in 1-2 hours and anything longer than 2 hours is considered to be a poor drainage situation. If it takes 6 hours to drain, you got problems!

gardengal48. what I have seen over many years of doing this test on many different soils is that if the water does not percolate through in 6 hours it usually will not, but less usually does not present a problem. My sand drains in minutes and down the road at a neighbors with clay that unamended soil takes 5 -1/2 hours but then another neighbor has sandy soil that will not drain, because of the high water table. My sources, for this, are what I have seen over the last 50 years or so.

Hmmmmm. It's never too late to learn something, I always say. Sticking to SOME things for 50 years are worth bragging about, but not everything. ;-)

Conducting soil drainage tests is certainly something I'd suggest for our original poster (thecurious), if he/she is not sure if poor water evacuation is a problem or not.

There are lots of ways to do this, and I'll attach a link to just one. But I ASSURE you....if the water takes 6 hours to drain....go for the raised bed or install a drainage system! (We had to do that in our front yard and it has worked very well. Ours system was more sophisticated than what you describe, but it probably needs to be.)

Here is a link that might be useful: One testing method

yes raised beds will do the trick, too easy.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page