How to Build Durable Raised Garden Beds (Planter Boxes)

Hey friends, Deanna here with Homestead and Chill, and Aaron and I are out here building some raised garden beds today with the cats, and I thought I would show you exactly how we build wooden raised garden beds just like these. So in this video, I'll quickly go over the supplies that you need or tools that you would need to do this, talk about a few different types of lumber that we recommend, and then some considerations about the dimensions or sizes of your beds. And if you've seen our older video on this topic, how to build a raised garden bed that I shared previously, basically the same process. We haven't changed the way we build our raised garden beds. I just figured I would re-film a different video because the last one was filmed in portrait, made for Instagram, and I know you YouTubers really like the landscape view. So come along and we'll talk about how to build these beds. So first things first, the types of lumber that you can use. We like to personally use part redwood for a number of reasons. One, it is pretty available in our area, where some other areas cedar is a good alternative that's more available than redwood. So between the two, cedar and redwood would be our top choices. Heart redwood in particular is a little bit more durable and long-lasting over common construction redwood. So if you have the option between the two, I would invest in the heart if it were me. Both options are really great with natural rot resistance and pest resistance like termites and things like that, and last a lot longer than softer woods like pine. So again, if you want your raised beds to last for a long time, especially with that pressure of constant moisture and soil, a nice durable wood is going to be your best bet, even more so than treated lumber. So a lot of folks wonder about that, and really treated lumber is often just treated pine lumber, so it doesn't last nearly as long as folks think. Redwood and cedar can even last longer, and because of the potential chemicals that are in treated wood, we generally stay away from it. And so the next thing I want to mention quickly before we get started is different sizes that you can do for your raised beds. So these beds here are four by eight feet, and the reason we choose that is a it's a good it's a good nice, you know, sizable bed where we could fit a lot of veggies and things in there. We have plenty of space to work with here in this garden, so we don't have any other size constraints that we're working against, but also I don't recommend making beds any wider than four feet across. You really never want to have to step in your bed to access it, and four feet is a good comfortable distance where you can reach into the middle from either side without having to step on your bed and compact your soil. So the other reason that we chose to do four by eight beds in this space was the lumber that we found to work with, which were eight foot long boards. So a that reduces our work because we don't even have to cut these long sides. This is just the eight foot boards as is, and then the short ends are the eight foot boards cut in half, which also then reduces any wasted lumber. So another example would be say if you had 10 foot boards to work with. Some really great sizes would be a six by four where you could cut it for those two sizes, or a seven by three out of that 10 foot. So it kind of depends on what you can find for lumber. That helps usually dictate the size of bed that I'm going to make. And then I should also mention that we prefer to use two by sixes rather than two by fours or anything skinnier. So thinner boards like fence boards, you know, thickness, they're going to rot out sooner. They're going to not resist the pressure of soil and potentially bow more. And then I like the six inch sections. Even if you could get 12 inches, that'd be great. I can never usually find those, but that means you have to use less lumber when you're trying to stack them nice and high. So that's my next point is different depth. So these are three two by sixes stacked high, which would make them, you would think 18 inches because three times six, but actually the two by sixes are truly only 5.5 inches tall. So it's 16 and a half inches tall. We really like this height because it's good, you know, ergonomically, it's a comfortable height to work with, but it's not overkill. We did use to build some beds a little higher at almost two feet. That's especially when we were trying to chicken proof them. So it was a nice height above our chicken's heads to easily access them. But then you have to think about your, you have to use that much more soil to fill your beds up, which, you know, can get costly. So we find that this 16 and a half, 18 inch height works really well for us. It's plenty of depth for good amount of soil for root space, for growing tall plants, you know, stuff with deep roots like tomatoes and things like that. And because we do block off the bottom of our raised beds with landscape fabric and hardware cloth. So that's something that I will show you a little closer up as well, but because we have a really bad gopher issue here, we do block the bottom and then just use the soil that we add to the beds in bulk and compost. So if you are having your beds open to the native soil below, you can actually get away with even more shallow beds. You can do six inch or 12 inch beds if you have it open because the roots are going to be able to go that much deeper into your native soil as well. Okay. And before I bring you over to where we're going to build, which is just over there, I just wanted to point out a couple of things for while you're taking measurements and cutting your lumber. Remember one little tip here is that you are going to whichever end you kind of sandwich in here. So this is our shorter end is sandwiched into the bottom. We end up gaining a little bit of distance, right? This is an inch and a half here and an inch and a half here. So if you're working with a really tight space and you want your garden beds to be very precise in their distance, just keep that in mind that you're going to gain a total of three inches. So if I wanted this bed to be a true four feet wide, I would actually cut this three inches shorter than four feet to get it to be that four feet wide, which is actually what we did. We cut these guys at 45 inches and now the bed is a true four feet. The other thing is because again, two by sixes or two by fours are kind of funny and they're not their true measurements is when you're cutting your corner pieces. So these are also redwood corner pieces here. They're four by fours. So that's one of the materials that you're going to need to add to your supply list. And if I would have cut that at 18 inches thinking that these are three, you know, six inch boards, it would have stuck up too high. So when you cut that, remember that these aren't a true six inches or whatever the size of your lumber, just go ahead and measure your height. And then we cut it at that height or just even a little bit below so that our corner pieces are the correct size for what we need. All right, so supplies needed. We need your lumber, including your four by four corners that we'll use to hold everything together. And then for screws, we really like to use decking screws because then we actually don't even have to pre-drill holes, which just makes it that much quicker and easier. So we just use these guys, nice three inch length, which is going to be nice and long enough to go through, you know, your wood and into the four by four corner. So use these, want your measuring tape, you know, if you need a saw to make any cuts. And then the other thing is if you have any length longer than six feet about, I suggest putting in a middle brace like this. And I'll show you that as we go, but this is just a galvanized steel mending brace or a mending plate, they call them. And that's just going to help keep those far boards nice and tight and nice and flush. Sometimes they can bow one way or another. And because this is the longest side, it's going to have the most pressure on it with that damp, heavy soil with time. So again, just keep everything nice and flush on those long ends. So we're all set up here in our little orchard patio area, and we like to work on a nice flat surface. And personally, we like to build the short ends of the raised bed first. You can see the stack of beds back there that we've already built. They're going to be slowly moving over into that garden space there. But yeah, so what we did is we like to lay out stuff just flat on the ground. If you want to go ahead and lay your boards out in a rectangle, the way the bed would be and then drill in from the side, you can do that. We found stuff kind of shifts and then we're just bending down even that much more. So you'll see as we go, the way we do it, we get to be standing a lot more. And as we get older, we appreciate that. So we set these guys up on the ground first with the two four by fours spaced evenly. So we get the measuring tape out once we get them flush with the ends of the short ends of the bed to make sure that everything is nice and square. So as you can see, these are just sitting right on the four by fours and nice and pretty much perfectly flush when I feel it with each side. And then all we're going to do is drive our screws right into here, down into the four by four on each of these boards that are all again, nice and tight and even. And same thing on this end. Here is one of the short sides built and the other short side. Now here's kind of the neat part is that we can go ahead and set these guys up about eight feet apart. We might have moved this a little bit. We'll see. But then go ahead and just set the long boards right on top of here and then attach them in the same way, right to the corner four by four. All right, let me give you a little closer look at this before we get things all screwed in, but the ends are all nice and flush with each end. And then we'll just be putting in two screws into the four by four, just like we did on the short side. And I don't know if you could really tell, but this middle board does stick up and kind of bow out a little bit more than the others, but that's where that mending brace that's going to go on the inside of this long side is going to suck that all nice and tight. And so that is how we build raised garden beds. So hopefully you can see it's a pretty quick and easy process, especially once you kind of get the hang of it and do a couple of yourself. And then yeah, we'll get it obviously all laid flat and add the mending brace. We'll go take a peek at a couple of these so I can show you the hardware cloth attached to the bottom as well. So that was another reason we wanted our beds to be exactly four feet wide is because you can buy hardware cloth for gopher proofing again in four foot lengths or three foot lengths. So this is kind of a pain in the butt to cut. You have to use like good aviation snips, like nice metal snips. So to reduce the amount that we had to cut, we made the beds at exactly four foot distance so we could just roll it out and attach it on. So we use a combination of some wide head cabinet screws that have this nice fat head that will kind of pinch the hardware cloth to the raised bed in a few spots and then just use a regular staple gun with some galvanized staples in between. And then it's all nice and stuck on there. And if you're doing gopher proofing for garden beds, you really do want to use hardware cloth like this, not chicken wire. This is durable and it will not rust out, it will not degrade with time. It's all galvanized. Where chicken wire, on the other hand, will degrade with time. The holes are larger, things can get through it, and gophers can even chew through it. So this is the most long lasting gopher protection and that would apply to voles and moles or other digging pests. All right, and so here's two of the raised beds in place waiting to be filled. I do have an article all about how we fill raised garden beds, but we mostly use bulk locally sourced organic compost and soil mixed together for these beds. I wanted to mention, too, spacing really quick since some new gardeners have questions about that. So we like to ensure we have enough space to bring wheelbarrows between all of our garden beds. And so that is usually a minimum of about three feet. We've spaced them even as close as two and a half in our old garden where we were working with a little bit more limited space. So we spaced them closer. These are about 45 inches apart right now, so under four feet, but a little over three feet. I just wanted a little added space, especially when certain plants, you know, like big old bushy squash and stuff, really start spilling out in the summer. The pathways can get pretty narrow. So I like a minimum or around three feet. And then the other thing you might be wondering, if you're seeing this pipe sticking out over here, is we're going to be working on putting in an irrigation system where we can have drip irrigation individually controlled to each raised bed. And so that'll be coming soon. I'll do a blog article, probably even a video about it. So once I do that, I'll add a link to that as well. But essentially, we're going to have, you know, some some irrigation pipe coming to the outside of all these beds, and then come up inside the beds. We just have it kind of capped for now. But then it'll convert to drip, and then have a nice little manifold and some drip tape, drip lines across each of these beds. So I'm really excited to get this whole system automated. All right, all right, check it out. It has been about a month since that last video. We've clearly been busy. We finished building the rest of the raised beds, got them all in place and filled. And then one thing I wanted to mention too, is that we did take a couple steps that we didn't normally used to do for our raised beds to help make these last as long as physically possible. One, we did apply a non-toxic food grade sealer to the inside of the raised beds, as well as silicone caulking, which is also non-toxic once it's dry, to all of the seams between the boards on the inside as well and in between the corners. Both of those steps are going to help reduce rot and just further kind of waterproof the inside of those beds to extend their lives. So I did write a blog article with seven different ways to extend the life of your raised beds, which goes over the details for all of that. So I will add a link to that article in the caption below here in this video, as well as links to other resources that might help you out. Again, how we fill these raised beds. And then I have a written blog article with all of the steps that we went over in this video to build raised beds, if you prefer written form with photos and things like that. And yeah, then I'll link any supplies that we used and anything else that you might find helpful. So check out the caption below. And we just want to thank you so much for tuning in. If you liked this video and found it useful, please give it a thumbs up and consider following along by subscribing. And then definitely check us out over on homesteadandchill.com. That's where we share the bulk of our information in written form. And we'll continue on making videos for you guys here as well, including the drip irrigation video, which will be next. We already got the irrigation lines installed to all these beds, and we're just gonna be working on doing the drip portion on top of the soil surface next. So thanks again for watching, and I hope you have a beautiful day and have fun building the garden of your dreams.