Our Garden--Building the Beds

We had a "big" garden at our old house. It was 20'x8', and had a variety of common veggies in it. I really love gardening, for many reasons--eating my own grown food is awesome, for one! It's also relaxing, rewarding, beautiful, and very educational. I was out in our garden pulling weeds in a million degree weather the day I went into labor with Annabelle, hoping that would kick me into gear (obviously no such luck there). So, needless to say, I was pretty bummed when we didn't have a garden last year. We had just moved into our house in March, and I just didn't have my act together enough to get one started. We did cut out the grass where we were hoping to put one this year, though.

After a lot of thought about it over the winter, I decided against putting our garden directly into the ground. Our subdivision is newer, so the soil pretty much stinks. It's really full of clay and lots of little rocks, and the pH level is all wrong. We could spend a ton of time trying to fix the soil, but really, it's a ton of work and it's not a guarantee. Nothing in gardening is really a guarantee, but at least we could try something that would most likely be more successful!

So, we decided to build ourselves raised garden beds. I did a bunch of reading online about them, and got the general idea. I'm not really one who likes to read and follow directions, so we got the gist and then made it up. It's not like it's hard, though, folks. There are some websites who wanted to get all fancy with it, but really, all you need is a wooden box shape to put soil in!

We decided on pine wood because it resists rotting. But, if you don't care, you could use old pallets or any wood you can find. I want mine to last a long time (less work in the long run!), so we went with more expensive and durable wood up front. We spent about $150 at Lowe's buying the wood. We went with the pieces that were 8 feet long, and 1 inch wide. We were planning on building 5 beds, 8x4 each. So we got 3 boards per bed.

(Parden the poor photos, still trying to figure out how to use my phone camera)

Then we cut 5 of the boards exactly in half using a mitre saw (well, Jason did).

Next we started putting our first bed together. We started just screwing right into the wood, but it made the wood split, darnit. In the corners that split, we ended up screwing a small piece of 2x4 to help support it, just in case it started to weaken more because of the split.

It took a little bit longer to do, but we decided to drill holes into the wood first for the rest of them to avoid splitting. It worked much better!

Victory!

We got all 5 beds done in less than two hours. Once we figured out what worked, the project flew.

When they were all finished, I used a measuring tape to space them out in the yard. I wanted 4' around the outside edge by the fence because I am planning on planting a few things there. There is about 2.5' between each bed.








We are planning to mulch the whole area around the beds and adding some sort of chicken wire fencing around it to keep Mojo out.

I ordered our topsoil and mulch from the Urbana Landscape Recycling Center, which lot cheaper than buying it from Lowe's. It's being delivered on Wednesday! Thank goodness our neighbors are letting us borrow their wheelbarrow--we're going to need it.