Manifesting summer with a picture of last years garden at its peak!
Okay, back to the reason for this post.
Raised Garden Beds
Raised garden beds don't have to be expensive. I see them for sale all over the place for $175-$600, while there is NOTHING wrong with buying them from someone when you have as much space as we do it is not the most cost effective way to do it. I started looking at different options for raised beds, raised beds are probably my favorite way to garden. The plants love it, there's less weed pressure and they look nice! What if I told you, you could build a nice looking 6'x3'x16" bed for about $40 a box? It's possible! I am going to share what we did, with the prices and the cuts. I feel like everyone should have the ability to have a nice looking garden for as cheap as possible.
Materials per 1 planter box
9 - 1x6x6' dog ear cedar fence pickets
2- 2x3x8' lumber
*you can use 2x2 lumber. We have some like that but this time the 2x3 was actually cheaper than 2x2*
1-1/4 screws
total cost
fence pickets $3.28x9= 29.52
2- 2x3x8' = $4.50
screws = 0.02 x 54 = 1.08
total with 6% sales tax = $37.20 for the ENTIRE BOX!
*All the materials came from Home Depot in Twin Falls. These were the prices as of April 2nd 2023*
Directions
1. cut the dog ear off the planks.
2. cut 6, 16.5" off your 2x3x8. you'll extra
3. attach you 6' planks to to the 2x3's you'll want to do one on each end and one in the middle. Do this 2x
4. cut your remaining 3 planks into 3' sections and attach them to each end of your two long sides.
THAT'S IT!
you now have a garden box ready to go! You can easily make these larger, do a 3'x3' box make them shorter. The options truly are endless. Gardening shouldn't cost an arm and a leg.
* You can line it with plastic if you'd like but cedar wood is rot resistant so we don't do this step.*
Fill them with quality soil. First year we order in from southern Idaho landscape. We always put cardboard as the very bottom layer.