Raised garden beds are a great way to plant a garden!
Last year I decided that a raised garden bed would fit our needs the best when it came to planting a garden. We don’t have very much space, and with the kids running around outside, I was afraid a traditional garden would get trampled! So we built two raised beds, one for our strawberries and the other for our bush beans.
This year, we added one more so that we can plant our tomatoes that we recently started from seed! We will also be practicing some crop rotation – we’ll be planting our tomatoes where our green beans were last year, and will put the green beans in the new bed.
Our garden beds measure about 3’x4′, but you can adjust the size to fit your needs. We also used untreated wood so that our plants wouldn’t absorb those chemicals.
To construct our raised garden bed
…all we used were (2) 4′ long x 12″ wide x 2″ thick boards and (2) 3′ x 12″ x 2″ boards. Again, these were untreated. We got our wood from Lowes and they were able to cut our boards down to the sizes we needed. We don’t have a truck, so this really helped us fit them into our mini van!
We also used (9) 4 inch exterior wood screws (affiliate link) to hold our raised bed together.
The diagram below shows how we over-lapped the boards to screw them in. Then the arrows point to the direction of our screws when screwing the boards together. (Sorry! The pics were lost during a clean-out!)
We used three screws at each corner to hold our raised bed frames together. The ones from last year held up nicely, so we just did the same for this years garden bed!
Now that our frame was complete, we could place it in our garden area!
The ground was a little uneven, so I dug up some of the dirt and placed it under the edges of the frame to lift it up a tad. It’s not perfectly even, but it’ll get the job done.
Then I poured (7) 38.5 quart bags of vegetable garden soil into the frame and smoothed it out. An 8th bag of soil went into last years raised bed. I used Harvest Organic Garden Soil last year and liked the results I achieved with it, so I used it again for this year’s bed.
We even found a friend and gave him a new home! (Probably a worm lol)
There ya have it! Our new raised garden bed all ready for some green beans!
Will you be gardening in a raised bed this year? Feel free to share in the comments!
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