Easy, Inexpensive DIY Raised Garden Beds

Easy, Inexpensive DIY Raised Garden Beds

Hi friend!

I’m really excited to share this easy, inexpensive DIY raised garden beds with you today! We obviously have a lot of other things going on, but I really felt it worth it to take a couple days and get a garden in this year. One thing that I’ve learned from our past homes is to make time and invest in some plants, trees, and gardens right away. It’s the one thing I didn’t prioritize in our other homes and regretted later. So I worked my booty off last week to get these done!

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Our Garden Plans

I have big garden dreams and plans that I’ll be sharing with you in the next couple of weeks in a homestead planning series here on the blog! But for this year the goal was just to get a small garden started and then we can add to it a little every year. So to get us started this year I built 4 raised garden beds.

Here’s what I needed for this project:

– 36 – 1x6x6 cedar fence boards
– 3 – treated 2x2x8s for corner support
– 3 – treated 1x4x6 for additional support across the middle
– deck screws
– saw
– plastic to line the sides of the beds
– stapler to attach plastic
– cardboard/newspaper
– compost – I used 2 bags per bed
– topsoil – we used dirt from a pile here at the farm
– raised garden bed soil – I bag per bed that covered 3 cubic feet

How I Built the Raised Garden Beds

First, I cut the shaped ends off of all the fence boards I needed for the length of the garden beds. This made them a little less than 6 feet long. Then I cut all the shorter ones to 24 inches for the width of the beds. Next, I used the left over scrap pieces of fence boards from those cuts to anchor the 3 boards together for each side with deck screws.

After all the sides of the beds were made I cut the 2x2s to length of each side, which would be the height of the bed, and attached one in each of the corners. I screwed them from the outside of the long boards first. Then I stood the shorter end sides up next to it and attached them the same way. I used my garden cart as a table to save my back lol!

Once the beds were built I measured and cut the 1x4x6s and attached them across the middle of beds so that they wouldn’t bow out with the weight of the dirt.

Filling the Garden Beds

I stapled plastic to the inside of the beds to prevent dirt from coming though and also the leaching of the treated wood into our dirt. I added some cardboard and newspaper to the bottom. Then the compost, the topsoil, and finally the raised garden bed soil as the top layer.

Planting the Garden

We planted varieties of cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, strawberries, black berries, watermelon, lavender, rosemary, basil, and oregano. I want to add some lettuce varieties still too! But for now I’m really happy and just hoping I can keep everything alive lol!