When this spring came around, we began looking at our yard and the area that was our garden last year. We knew we needed something different, both for aesthetics and for a better use of space. Our garden last year was a large rectangle of all sorts of different plants mixed together. Things grew well, but it became quite the mess. We were relatively new gardeners so we did not realize that mixing cucumbers with tomatoes would not end well. The cucumbers and squash overtook the garden with the cucumber vines strangling the tomato plants. Anyway, you get the picture. We needed something different for this year.
In come the raised wood beds idea. I love Pinterest and spent so much time finding different ideas for gardens. We have dogs, so we knew we wanted something that was raised to keep the plants safe. In addition, we are on a budget so we were in search of something that would keep the cost low. I decided on raised beds and figured the cost would be low since it was just the price of the wood and screws.
I decided on 1x6x8 (1 inch x 6 inch x 8 feet long) cedar boards. We took a trip to Home Depot and I purchased 24 of these in total, which allowed me to decide between building two 2 foot high raised beds or four 1 foot high raised beds. We decided to do four 1 foot high raised beds so we had more areas to plant.
Just a word of caution: if you are building these for plants you plan to eat, do not use pressure treated wood. There are chemicals on the wood that can leach into the soil that will grow your plants.
Because we decided to do four 1 foot high raised beds, each bed will use six boards. The long sides are two 8 foot boards and each small side is one 8 foot board cut in half to produce two four foot boards. Had we decided on two 2 foot high beds, it would have been a total of twelve boards for each bed (four boards on the long side and two on the short side).
In addition to the wood, I also purchased two boxes of screws for the project. If you are not sure what to get, we got these. You will also need 4″x4″ wood posts for the corners. I did not have to purchase these as we had multiple laying around from previous projects.
Once we got home, it was time to start the project. I recruited help from my dad for the project. We completed the project in steps, fully completing one then moving onto the next step. The first step was to measure and cut the posts for the corners. We measured them at one foot and cut, needing four for each box. Then we cut eight of the boards in half to create 16 total four foot boards for the short sides of each box.
Once the cutting portion was done, we moved on to the building portion. We used the 2″ Deckmate screws to secure everything together. Each post piece was placed on a corner, and the ends of the boards were secured with two screws to it.
Looking back, we definitely could have (and should have) reinforced the sides with a beam in the middle of the long side, but we did not. Because we did not do this, we do have some slight bowing outwards from the pressure of the dirt inside the beds. Hindsight is 20/20!
We repeated this process four times to create all of the garden beds. It took about two days in total to get the materials, do the cutting, and secure the boxes. We placed them where we were thinking they would go and worked to level them out.
Here are some pictures of the finished four garden beds! It’s a huge upgrade from our garden last year! In a few years, I do plan to upgrade these to some nicer beds as well as add gravel around them to create a walking path.
Do you have any questions about the raised beds? Have you built your own? I’d love to hear about your own experiences building raised beds for you garden – let me know in the comments!
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