Raised Garden Beds: 3 out of 4 Done!

Yesterday we built 3 out of 4 raised bed frames for the garden.  There's still a ton of work to do, but it's progress.  We learned a lot about raised beds over the weekend, starting with how expensive cedar is.  Now you really have to use cedar because untreated pine will rot and compressed/treated wood is filled with chemicals and poisons that will leach into the soil and into your tomatoes.  Building chemical-filled beds for a backyard organic garden is more than a little counter-productive.  We were set on buying cedar.  Except our local lumber yards wanted about $1,000-$1200 on average for the cedar planks we needed!  Yes, that's right - $1200 just for the "low grade" cedar wood for something we're going to fill with dirt!  How people can build cedar decks at that price completely baffles me.  Apparently they are millionaires.  Anyways, Home Depot saved the day with planks at $25** each - still incredibly painful, but at least I didn't have to sell a kidney to grow a few tomatoes.  And it's important to me to do this right once the first time - I plan on spending every summer out here tending this garden.

We loosely followed instructions from Sunset and Popular Mechanics, except we replaced the cedar 4x4 in the corners with a piece of 2x6 cut down into 2x3s.  I'm sure a 4x4 would be sturdier in the long run, but Home Depot didn't have any cedar 4x4s in stock (and it takes 3-4 weeks for special order) and those overpriced lumber yards wanted more than $100 for one.  So we substituted an extra 2x6 instead and the frames still feel very sturdy anyways, and we added some extra screws in the corners for added support.

For detailed instructions, check out Sunset/Popular Mechanics.  Building beds was a very simple project that anyone could do even by themselves (except for moving the completed bed frames, that requires a buddy).  Basically we built them upside-down by lining up our 2x6 pieces to create a 4'x8' a rectangle on the ground and screwing them into the corner pieces, taking care to make sure that everything was done at a 90 degree angle.  The first corner is the hardest because nothing is put together yet, but after that everything else comes together quickly.  Once the first layer was put together, we screwed on a second layer right on top of the first, then flipped the whole thing over right side up.  The corner pieces are 18" long - 6" longer than the sides of the beds because those get buried in the ground and help keep the bed from shifting position over time.

We ran out of 3.5" galvanized exterior wood screws (the Home Depot employee grossly overestimated the number of screws in the 1 lb box), otherwise we would have built number 4 as well.  Right now the beds feel really huge, but I think once we put them behind the garage (we have a lot of space back there) they won't feel so overwhelming.  Plus I'm really excited to have so much space for all my plants - after living with a container garden for so many years, this is like upgrading from a trailer to a mansion!

** Note: Apparently NJ is significantly more expensive for lumber than other parts of the country.  For example, according to the Home Depot website, in Illinois the same cedar planks are available at $9 each.