When we planted our garden this year, we decided to plant asparagus and artichokes. Since both of these plants come back after the first year, we figured planting them in raised beds would be a good idea. Which meant I had to build two boxes that would become the raised beds.
garden boxes pre-dirt
I’d built garden boxes for us before–at our old house, we had a raised bed garden in the front yard. However, the first set of garden boxes weren’t exactly top quality. I basically took 2x6x4s and screwed them together at the joints. As in screwing one piece of wood directly onto the other piece of wood. I put two screws in each corner. Needless (I think) to say, these boxes didn’t hold up well, especially to moving. And they bowed out so much that the corners started to strip the screws right out of the wood. When we moved to our current house, we brought the boxes in pieces.
So this year I worked out a little better plan for building the boxes. Instead of screwing the boards together at the joints, I used metal braces on the inside corners. This made a big difference. Here’s basically what I did to put together two 16′ x 4′ garden boxes:
1. Got (1) 2x6x8 and (3) 2x6x16 boards, (8) metal corner braces, and lots of screws at our local hardware store. The wood stuck dangerously out the back of my ’96 Jimmy, but we made it to the house in one piece.
2. Cut some of the boards from the old garden boxes into 4′ pieces for the ends of the boxes. Since the store didn’t have four 16′ boards, I had to combine two 8′ boards to make the second side of the artichoke box (you can see this on the right of the bottom box in the final picture). I used a circular saw and work table to do this. (Although I could have used the table saw that I’ve never actually turned on. Someday.)
3.a Started putting the boxes together by screwing a corner brace onto one piece of wood then propping up the next piece of wood and screwing it into the other side of the brace.
brace yoself, fool
3.b When I screwed the braces on, I first had to drill pilot holes in the boards for the screws. An easy way to do this is to hold the brace against the board, and mark where you’ll drill with a pencil. Then you can lay the board down flat, without the brace on it, and drill all the holes you need. When you go to mount the brace, your work will be much easier.
4. Repeated on each corner of the two boxes.
boxes ready for dirt, asparagus, and artichokes.
After the boxes were both put together, we laid down mulch paper for the boxes to sit on top of. We have some pretty serious grass that likes to get into our garden, so the mulch paper should smother out anything that might have wanted to grow up through our raised beds. After the paper was laid down and the boxes lined up how we wanted them, we put a layer of pine straw in each box. (In the picture above, you can see the line of garbage bags at the top. We basically took our neighbor’s bagged pine straw off the side of the road and used it in our garden (we don’t have any pine trees in our yard, but all our neighbors do)). On top of the pine straw, we filled each box in with dirt we bought at a local landscape store. It was a ton of dirt (literally, I think, each box took an actual ton of dirt).
So if you’re in the market for a garden but don’t want to till up your yard, raised beds are a pretty low maintenance option. The boxes are easy and fairly cheap to build, and they make keeping the grass out of your garden much easier.
