Building raised beds using reclaimed barn wood

Hey welcome back to the food forest. Yesterday we did this. We made a whole bunch of raised garden beds using reclaimed wood from barn teardowns. The siding is reclaimed as well. These are good things to do anytime that you can intercept stuff going into a waste stream and then turn them into something useful and functional. That is my jam. It also saves a bunch of money and I actually kind of like the way they look. They look a little bit rustic. They look like they've been here for a while. So we'll rewind, we'll show you the build, we'll show you what we did yesterday and I hope you enjoy the video. So just a tip, whenever you're screwing stuff in you don't want to screw in like this where the screw is going into the end of the grain. You actually want to go where the screw end is actually going to end up in the piece of wood against the grain. It's just a it's a stronger fasten. Yeah. That'll hold much better through against across the grain. We're just using a compressed air nailer. Oh we're actually almost out. So it's a compressed air wire coil gun and super easy load. Makes you double double take everything you see on YouTube or the internet right? Super easy. Oh look at that it just popped right in because they turned the camera and did nine shakes. Now this is the inside of the bed so the soil will actually push up against this. These nails really just have to keep this in place. So next thing we're doing is putting these brackets on the corners just to stiffen it up. Do you think you should have got bigger ones? No these are good. It's actually good enough. These are good yeah. It goes right through the tin. You do both sides right? Like all four? Yeah. Yeah. And and and down the bottom? Yeah and we'll flip it. All right so now we're just going to flip it and do the same on the other side. So this lived as a barn for about 80 years and then now it's going to live as a garden bed hopefully for another 80. But when you use barn reclaimed wood you get different sizes right? People used you know just whatever they could cut back in the day. So this is just that much smaller than that. We have this here so we'll just basically hide that. This will be the bottom of the bed. But I guess that's what you get when you just use reclaimed recycled barn wood. You get what you get. But I actually think it looks nicer actually than brand new. It looks rustic. Looks like it's been there for a long time. We're going to put the last brackets on and then we'll transport it over. and every brand holds a new end eyes on the road don't lose control i'm speeding fast to chase my soul i'm driving motions high and low holding on neon lights in the fast lane light riding high reaching for the sky i had it all but lost and fell back down spent my time playing the game where every single day was a losing battle and every drink was a dead end lose control i'm living fast i've lost my soul i'm driving to get away running through emotions high and low okay so the wife said that's the unit you drive and sit in stationary with your leg up and and that's what's bothering me and it says to fix that you have to uh you have to rest it constant rest and you know me i can't rest anything you know what i mean so best part about this is this was just on a facebook marketplace one day bunch of free tiny little crushed up pea gravel so i grabbed it this was like three years ago put it in the corner of my driveway i've just been parking the back of the trailer over top of it figured i'd use it at some point well this is the easy way to level we're basically just on the high side dig a trench i'm gonna fill it with gravel so there's no soil contact with the wood let the sun shine in the day i'm trying to make this darkness go away i'll paint with colors and i'll sing until my lungs give up let the sun shine in the day leave my windows open so that i can hear the sound of people talking the wind blowing in the trees oh i will open up my eyes so i can see the light oh and i'll try to spread my wings so i can fly oh and the darkness starts to fade feels like things are gonna go my way i'll let the sunshine in the day i'm gonna let the past be filled with smoke so there we go so that's two of them we're gonna put two more there we're gonna put trellis between them so we want five feet between them that'll put a nice roughly seven eight foot arc on the trellis the beds aren't you know level with each other but they're level with the ground and that's totally fine i don't care about that i don't want to raise all this up or lower all that down too much this is just garden beds it's not a house foundation or anything like that but i think so far pretty good no oh i'm definitely putting that in the video are you oh yeah no you're not oh it's funny it is funny i don't i don't mind making myself look dumb yeah i think people actually like it yeah because it looks real it's real yeah well look what i've done yeah look at that big gummy this looks lower but it's higher right even though it looks lower yeah and it'll it'll like settle oh yeah this side's probably high with the stones i guess bang on it looks higher but it's not i know and it looks like it's done but when you look at that that's how deceiving it is yeah it looks like it's hot all right so here we go these are the final beds and now we're filling them with wood make that wood core raised bed it's a lot of material that goes into that so we might as well use all the wood that we have around and we've been filling some of this one up so just all the woody debris we want that on the bottom that'll help absorb moisture and hold it in then we put really hot nitrogen on top of it so we're going to go get a fresh load of horse manure from my sisters and that'll help break it down faster and we expect it's going to do a lot of settling in the first couple years so i may not wood chip the top of this because it's going to probably sink down a good foot or two in the first year and then probably next year we'll probably put a good six inches eight inches of wood chips on top and grow no-till gardening in these hugel raised beds and the last thing we're going to do is we're going to put trellises between the beds so we can walk underneath squash hanging down that kind of thing we can really maximize vertical space we'll probably still grow the tomatoes on the back fence there because tomatoes when they're already starting three feet off the ground tomatoes are just going to be too high to harvest it'll be annoying so any kind of climber any really tall plant will probably still go in the annual garden back here in these beds and these uh brand new raised garden beds will be mostly for stuff like beets and salad greens and peppers and that kind of thing so hope you enjoyed this is massive raised beds done on a budget using recycled wood and metal that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill somewhere so now they get to live out the rest of their existence in a garden bed