Building Raised Garden Beds

Over the past couple of weekends, Troy and I have been busy tackling some outdoor projects and getting the yard ready for the upcoming summer. One of the biggest projects of the spring has been building raised garden beds. Now that the lawn is doing well on its own, we wanted to move on to growing edible things.

When we were designing the landscape plan just before moving into the house, we intentionally left the area behind the garage untouched. The ground is sloped and mostly unusable for anything besides gardening.

We decided to build some raised beds into the hill. This will help keep things organized and hopefully deter animals from eating our veggies (although I have a few ideas of additional tactics I’ll try to keep the bunnies and squirrels away).

Troy found this image online and roughly based his own plans off of it. (I failed to find a source for this image, so I apologize to the original author for not including one!)

A trip to the local Home Depot provided us with everything we needed to build four garden beds while testing the load capacity of my poor SUV.

Troy got to work building the beds one by one. He built the long sides first and we carried them into the backyard for assembly.

With the first bed, both long sides got buried first before attaching the shorter boards to the opposite sides. By the fourth and final bed, we figured out that attaching the shorter boards first provided a much more accurate placing for the second long side.

Burying the posts made these beds incredibly sturdy. These guys aren’t going anywhere!

And like magic, three more beds appeared! Just kidding. This took us all day. But by the end, we had four beautiful and huge garden beds ready to be filled!

Each bed is 8 feet by 4 feet, which should be more than enough room to house all of the seedlings that I started earlier in the spring.

The following weekend, the beds got prepped for soil. I laid a mixture of newspaper and this weed barrier at the bottom of each bed.

Early Saturday morning, we got our soil delivery!

I spent the rest of the morning shoveling dirt. I was able to get three of the four beds mostly filled before running out of steam. I also built a trellis for the pea plants. Brady helped, naturally.

The next day, Troy and I worked together to finish filling the beds. We ended up with more soil than we needed, and we used the excess to fill in low spots around the yard. We also laid a layer of soil around the beds and planted grass seed. It’s a bit of a muddy mess at the moment, but eventually there will be nice pathways of lush grass between each bed.

Two strawberry plants have already moved in, and the rest of the seedlings will be planted next weekend. I’m excited to watch my little plant babies grow!