This fabric raised bed has been one of the best gardening purchases I have ever made. This is my 3rd year using it. My mother and I both love gardening but we are aging and live in a rental house. Plowing up the ground is not an option nor is bending over to plant or weed. I saw this fabric bed reviewed on a garden show and thought it might solve some problems. The first year was the most difficult and expensive because I had to fill the bed with the proper soil mix. It's been a breeze since then. In the fall, I just dump all the pots on top of this raised bed and then throw in some manure and granite dust. Then I cover the entire thing with black plastic and let it sit there all winter. By spring, I might adjust the soil mix a bit depending on what I plan to grow but not usually. The 1st year we grew a mix of tomatoes and peppers with good yield. Year 2 was all tomatoes and we had a terrific harvest. This year it's pole beans. I have included a few photos at the bottom. Keep in mind that I have not moved the bed since I put it down in the spring of 2014 and that the guys who mow our lawns and weed whack around it about once a week. It has stood up to all of that and quite a bit of snow and ice. It is an excellent investment.

I bought this for using as a raised bed in a full sun area. As far as raised beds go, this was very convenient, just set up pour in some dirt, and then more dirt, and more dirt..yes a lot of dirt was required to fill this. Over all I spent over $150 in dirt and fertilizer to fill this thing. And yes, of course I went organic with it, why would you go through the bother to grow your own food with anything but organic, but I digress.
As a raised bed, one expects a more prolific harvest that is extended longer and ripens quicker. This met those expectations. I grew watermelon, beets, nasturtium and okra in this. I had about a dozen or so fruits from the watermelon, of several varieties. This was a perfect use for this bed, as I pre-planned that the watermelon would escape the bed and crawl several feet out of it.
This was a good result from a year 1 use of this product. Expect it to cost a lot for dirt. Water retention will depend on your growing medium. My mix was perfect. I had a bit of blossom end rot, but I don't believe the bag bed had anything to do with that.
I would definitely recommend this product for beginner and seasoned growers alike.

Ok, Smart Pots awesome. See my photo taken 10th October 2015, where it's STILL producing like mad [picked a bunch of yellow summer squash, cukes and still tomatoes this morning], in Colorado no less. I just bought several Junior bag beds to add to my garden to grow more next year, (ditching all other pots) and some taller pot style Smart Pots to try potatoes & some new things. For Soil, additives, fertilizer and irrigation I used, see below.. it was foolproof, anyone could do this.

I used a mix of (all organic) garden soil for raised beds (NOT potting soil), my own & some commercial compost dirt (I compost over winter, Colorado Boulder area gets 300 days of sun, so it works), some vermiculite to aerate and retain moisture, little bit of lime on the tomatoes side, some coir throughout and shoved uncomposted bananas, eggshells, coffee grounds & some other soft, non seeded veggie waste, straight into the soil all season.
I planted the seedlings I raised back in Feb (inside by a south facing window, in a cheap little greenhouse that can be disassembled). I placed a mint plant (chocolate mint because I like the flowers) in the middle (MUST be in a container, in the earth, not direct planted or it will take over your bed & garden !) to keep bugs at bay and it worked, I don't used any herbicides or pesticides & grow completely organic, I use Dr. Earth 706P Organic 7 All Purpose Fertilizer in Poly Bag, 4-Pound fertilizer (various ones for general and tomatoes etc)
The Coir I used, was this one and I just bought more Compressed Coconut Coir Brick, 10 Pound (lb)-Green Texan Organic Farms

I irrigated it with just micro line drippers running off a standard garden hose connected to a timer system, used one 2 gal-per-hour dripper at the bottom of each tomato plant (4 of them - 2 yellow salad pear and 2 giant heirloom and got SO MANY I ran out of room in our giant freezer after making 2 very big batches of sauce (over 60 pounds worth), eating pounds, giving bags of them away), PLUS planted eggplant (1 plant), cucumber (1 plant), summer squash (4 plants, different kinds) and a bell pepper. I increased auto watering time over the summer as they grew and rooted deeper. Very efficient & easy.

It all fit in the largest Bag Bed, Not ONE thing died or failed to produce, they all grew and all produced incredibly well all summer (some still are & it's almost mid Oct), especially the tomatoes, squash and cukes. Best growing system I ever used. EVER. Better than my raised cedar bed or whiskey barrel or other pots or ground planting and I can reuse it for at least a few years.
I'm also going to try my herbs in the upright hanging-garden style ones next season, attached to the fence, being all about efficient watering and irrigation on everything, because I have automatic timers set up on 3 garden hose lines with a 12 line micro tube manifold set up on each hose for my veggies, flowers & herbs to each bed and pot, so for a disabled person, this makes it possible for me to garden, for an able person, it makes it effortless, once set up.

It was lot of effort to set all this up, mostly the irrigation, but the Smart Pots were the absolute easiest part and WOW are they sturdy and work exceedingly well at growing anything. I'm prepping my new ones now for next year so all I have to do is turn the soil a bit, fertilize and throw my seedlings in there. Just Awesome and pays for itself in organic produce in weeks once fruiting starts.

I did also use an Earth Box to grow more tomatoes and although they produced well, it was a complete pain to water down a tube (my only manual watering, because a micro line wouldn't fill it during the timer watering I had everything on), to fill the base of the box so it would wick up water. The legs collapsed on the one I had, so I put it on the ground, but the rubber thing holding the (barely big enough) black plastic you have to use, over the plant bases snapped as soon as it got some sun and kind of flapped there all summer with the plants just holding it (I tried to tie it, but kept coming loose), but resulted in a lot of evap and the plants never got as big and fruitful as the Smart Pots plants which were a lot less effort.

Nope, not affiliated with this company in anyway, but I'll praise the product all day long.

This has been the joy of my summer. I am NOT a gardener and this has been successful beyond measure. Here are a few quick comments:

1. It has a bottom so you don't need to remove grass before using it.

2. "Mel's Mix", is recommended by many people here, but it's very expensive (1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 peat moss or coco coir, 1/3 good compost). So I used Mel's mix for the bulk of the soil, but used sand and cheap garden soil on the bottom, and Miracle-Grow for the topsoil. I can get anything to grow in this, and if I periodically add more good compost, the soil should last indefinitely.

3. Drainage is great. The breathable sides of the pot keep plants from being waterlogged. The vermiculite and peat moss in Mel's Mix also do a lot to balance the moisture. We had triple our normal rainfall this summer, and my plants did great.

4. If you put high-quality soil in this pot, you can use it to give plants a good start, and then transplant them to a different garden. I did this with my cucumber and it went crazy this year. I also resurrected some snapdragons that were on their last legs in the clearance aisle.

5. I put this around my mailbox. It was easy to cut an X through the bottom with heavy shears. I planted wave petunias in the regular clay soil surrounding the pot to hide the edges. This gave me a beautiful two-tier garden. I also put a heavy layer of mulch around the rest of of the mailbox area and set potted tomatoes on the mulch.

6. I planted lots of seasonal flowers and herbs, strawberries, and baby watermelons. When my melons started to vine, I just trained the vines over the side of the BBB and onto the mulch. After they grew even more, I moved my potted tomatoes to another location and let the vines take over.

I don't see any reason why this wouldn't last through the winter. After the sunflowers die down I plan to put in mums, then add more compost and plant bulbs for next spring. In the winter I'm sure I can dress it up with Christmas decorations and maybe a snowman. : )

I've noticed that with the raised bed, neighbor kids seem to be more careful. I've never had any problems with kids stepping on plants or picking the flowers. No problems with animals, either. I really like the raised bed concept.

I have two of these currently placed on top of old pallets growing storage onions in. the onions have taken off exceptionally well. If all goes right, I'll harvest between 150-200 onions between the two grow beds. I used the smart pots last year to successfully grow two varieties of pumpkins, 1 watermelon variety, and about 20 tomato plants. All of the plants in the smart pots did 2-3x better than those planted in traditional containers and raised beds. At the time we were living in SD with a growing zone of 3b. We had a very mild summer. While most of my neighbors, even farmers at the farmers market were having a hard time getting produce to ripen and grow, I was harvesting 8-10 pints of tomatoes every 1-2 days come early August. I had 8 yellow petite melons that grew very well, I cut them too early, otherwise would have ripened just fine, and harvested about 2 doz Jack be Little pumpkins (from 1 60-65 gal smart pot) and 8 full sized pumpkins, about 100 pounds worth, from 1 60-65 gal smart pot. I trellised the vines on all the pumpkins and melons and they did wonderfully even with cold temps; we had a high of 60 on July 1st! Great investment.

My onions are 2-3 times the size within the 7 days since transplanting; I bought small onion sets that were about the size of chives in most cases, a few being like small pencils. They don't stay as attractive as the picture on the package shows but they work! I'm debating forgoing traditional raised beds and just using several of these garden beds and 60-400 gallon bags. They really do work and keep the soil at optimal temps and limit the pest issues. It's my goal to produce as much of our family's food as possible and with a few of the 200 gal bags I'll be able to plant 50-60 pounds of seed potato and yield if all goes right 800-1200 pounds of potatoes. Obviously more than we can eat, but that's how well these things work!