Hey Cliff, cool idea. A couple of thoughts:

Eliminating the perched water table will only work if it connects to the earth. Sure, adding ropes will help lower the water table, but they don't eliminate the problems with containers.

I think the better design would be to have something similar to your second design where a portion of the bed connects to the earth below. This will not only eliminate the perched water table, but allow microbes and whatnot to move up and down between the earth and soil. I've moved most of my big trees to raised beds because it's just so much easier to manage.

The biggest issue with containers is the soil. If you don't connect the table to the earth, you'll have to replace the garden soil almost every year. Digging out an elevated bed like that, even with a wicking rope, would be a real pain.

Personally, I'd just make a really tall raised bed and fill it with bulk soil and pine bark. It wouldn't be that expensive. And it'll give you all the benefits of having a raised bed. But there's lots of ways to do this. Take a look at the Vegtrug as well. If you built something like that, I'd still have it connected directly to the ground below.

The other option is to do a hybrid wicking bed like my system. The plants are in fabric pots and sit on a bed of lava rock always filled with water. The plants drink the water up from the bottom, similar to a giant Earthbox. It allows me to move the plants around, repot when I want and the plants always have optimum water levels and the perched water table is a non issue. The growth is explosive. This shot is from a week ago in socal winter, I have corn, tomatoes, strawberries, kale, sugarcane, blackberries and other stuff:

Hi Jay,

Thanks for the feedback. Raised beds on the ground would certainly be a bit easier. In my case, however, I'm building the raised platform bed to overcome shade from the house. There is only one location in the yard I can put my garden, which happens to be on the north side of the house. The fence between my neighbor and myself is such that I can only put the garden in a place where the ground itself is in shade for part of the day. But if I raise the container about 2 feet (I did this with peppers in plastic bins last year) I can get the plants into sunshine for pretty much the whole day. Building a raised bed as tall as I'd like to make it would probably work, but would require a lot of soil.

The Vegtrug (from a glance) actually seems pretty similar to what I'd had in mind. My thought was that if I built a lower spot in the container bottom, the perched water table would not be eliminated, but it would be localized to a small section where it would not interfere much with the actual growing space in the rest of the box. That's conjecture though. I'm not sure if it works that way in reality. If I used wicking ropes, they'd be in contact (partially buried?) with the ground.

For the soil, I'd thought about changing it. My thought was to build the front of the box so that it was removable. Then I could pop it off and shovel / rake out as much of the soil as I'd like, then put the front back on to refill. I think I'd prefer to try to just amend the soil with compost / compost tea / fertilizer and see if that works first. If not... hey... it's a learning process.

My more immediate soil problem appears to be just finding enough vermiculite where I live to make a mix for this bed. :-)

Cool, makes sense. Having dealt with the soil change issue, I've sworn I'd never go back. The trap door sounds like a good idea.

The compost/tea/etc will only really work if you have your bed connected to the earth directly, that's how the microbes and all that function. I've done full organic in pots and it can work, but teas are a different story, they usually don't have enough NPK to make it worthwhile.

Here's another thread on this stuff (linked below). I'm building another tall bed/table for lettuce and whatnot. Again, it's all with the wicking principle. Plants sit on the wicking substrate in pots. Makes changing them out wildly easier and I can get far more plants in the bed since roots don't crowd out other plants. Wicking tables are how many commercial growers do it.

Something like this but on legs would be killer: http://vimeo.com/95573364

Regarding the soil, skip vermiculite if you want to keep the soil for a while. It breaks down pretty easily. I use Pro-mix HP. It's available at Home Depot and works great. I also mix 5-1-1 mix and gritty for cactus, but for veggies, I use Pro-mix.

Here is a link that might be useful: raised bed

Jay, thanks for the additional tips. I'll definately take a look at the info. The pro mix will be a bit pricy (about $200) for this bed (we're on a pretty tight household budget) but I'd like to try it out in some smaller containers. I haven't had a chance to check out the link yet but I will. Realistically, I'm so new to this I'd be amazed if I started something now and didn't learn so much that I wanted to change it all in 2 years. Life as a computer programmer has taught me to just get something (anything) working, even if it's full of mistakes and iterate on it until it's "better" then "great". Answers from helpful people like you are huge in that process so thank you again! If I can keep this years tomatoes from looking like a 1980s zombie movie with oozing wounds and crawling bugs (last year was BAD!) I'll be happy!

I think in terms of the original question, I've decided on a mix between design 2 and 3. I'll slope the bottom of the container to one side to lower part of the water table & then use a rope to ground to wick the water out. This might be redundant, but I'd rather have unnecessary redundancy than rotting roots. :-)