Our raised bed garden project has been an absolute labor of love. Gardening has been quite a bit of trial and error for us over the last 10 years. While dreaming of a big garden, we’ve struggled with timing, soil, and what grows best for our area. Determined to get it right, we decided to build some raised bed gardens and invest in some good soil. I’ve done a lot of research on what grows best in our area and started a garden journal to try to get the timing down. Now that our raised beds are finished and we’ve put in a few seeds for our fall garden, I wanted to share what we’ve done. Fingers crossed, I’ll be sharing about our garden success in a few months!
The Main Raised Bed Garden
The main garden (and my favorite) is made from 2 rectangular boxes that are 3′ wide x 9′ long and 32″ tall. Connecting the two boxes are 2 cattle panels – these come in 16′ lengths and are 50″ wide. Climbing plants like squash, cucumbers, beans, peas, or even tomatoes will love navigating their way up these panels. And, when we (hopefully) have a huge crop, it should make it easier to pick the vegetables. We attached the panels to the wood with little clips (found in the electrical aisle of home improvement store) and screws.
My parents have a raised bed garden like this and it is just the neatest thing to see all the plants climbing up – so beautiful.
Look at all these happy plants!
The nice feature about this garden is that it’s higher off the ground – no bending over to weed.
Smaller Raised Bed Gardens
Then, we made some smaller boxes because I thought it would be neat to do smaller gardens with companion plants, like a 3 sisters garden with corn, beans, and squash or another with potatoes and peas. Mother Earth News has some great information about companion planting. I tried to design the gardens around what grows well together and how they could be planted easily. These boxes are 3′ x 3′ and 16″ tall.
Easy Set-up Raised Bed Garden
The last garden bed was an impulse buy on Amazon Prime Day – why is garden stuff so hard to resist buying! This raised bed garden is a round fabric, Smart Pot. For Christmas one year I received a smaller Smart Pot that I planted lemongrass in. I love the pot because it’s lightweight, yet large enough to plant something substantial. And, the lemongrass seems to thrive in it. So when I saw this Big Bag Bed it at a deep discount, I couldn’t resist. It was super easy to set up – just unfold and fill with soil. After spending many weekends building the cedar raised bed garden, this just seemed so easy. I think it would be perfect for a small space. It isn’t as tall as the other raised bed gardens, but the ease of set up definitely has benefits.
Built in Compost Bins
In each of the raised bed gardens, we have a bucket with holes drilled into the bottom and sides that we use for compost. We originally had a large compost bin in another area of the yard, not close to the new garden. Since it was pretty big and made from wood, we thought we’d move it over to the garden area. The ideas was to turn a portion of it into garden space, leaving the center area still available for compost. Well, when we tried to move it, we realized that much of the bottom was rotten. I was in a bit of a panic as our compost bin was in pieces. No way did I want to go back to throwing food scraps in the garbage can.
After some thought and rummaging around the garage, we noticed some home depot buckets. The buckets already had drainage holes (leftover from the upside down tomato plant craze). We decided to put these buckets in the center of each garden and add our food scraps. Over time, the scraps should compost down and feed the soil.
Here is a little video tour to show you more. Enjoy!
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Thanks for this gardening inspiration! I need to do this project in my flowerbed by my laundry room; one of the few places on our lot that gets full sun.
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Thanks, Cynthia. 🙂