If you have decided to start your garden by constructing raised garden beds, you have many choices to make this happen.
Depending on your budget, you can purchase kits to assemble in your garden area or purchase the materials and construct you own. Common sizes for growing vegetables are 2’x4’, 4’x4’, 4’x8’. They can be anywhere from 5 ½” to about 16” tall.
Raised garden bed kits can be pricey to purchase and generally even more pricey to have delivered. A simple search brought me to this site for raised garden bed kits (scroll up when you get there).
I cannot endorse this company and its product as I have not yet used it – but it checks many boxes for this being a great option:
- The kits are made from 1 ¼” Vermont White Cedar. This is untreated lumber and cedar resists rot & bugs.
- The ‘slot & peg’ construction, while olde fashioned and rustic, requires no nails or screws to stay together.
- And the price seems fairly reasonable (with free shipping!) – About $135 for a 2’x4’x8” bed up to about $230 for a 4’x8’x8” bed. And you can stack the beds if you want them to be higher than 8”.
Wayfair also provides a number of different raised garden bed kits with free shipping.
There are also a number of more economical ways to build a garden of raised beds.
If you have a mill nearby, you can order 2×6 dimensional untreated lumber cut to your specification. Again, you are looking for rot and bug resistant wood, which generally points to a variety of cedar, cypress or redwood. You can either use deck screws to fasten the boards together or planter wall blocks.
There have been many opinions published regarding the dangers (or not) of treated lumber. Since the new processes for pressure treating lumber were introduced in the early 2000s, the wood is less toxic than it had been prior to that.
You can also place a plastic covering around the inside of the raised bed. This will protect against chemicals & keep grass and weeds from growing in the bed. With 2×6 treated lumber you can construct a 4’x8’x6” raised bed for about $55 plus screws or planter wall blocks. All you need to purchase is three 2x6x8’ boards (about $14/each these days), cut one of them in half and screw them all together to make a box.
Whichever option you choose, placing raised beds in your garden space makes good gardening sense.
