I’ve wanted to build raised beds for some time, and we decided this was the year to go big for our veggie garden! I came up with my own design idea, but I’ll tell you what I’d do differently in a minute. We had to make some decisions on lumber, placement, hardware, and irrigation, which is still sort of pending…

Lumber Choice

It would have been nice to build them all with redwood, since it resists rot, and they’ll be constantly getting wet. But it’s expensive, and I guess that’s appropriate, since we don’t want to chop down our precious redwood forests any faster than we are. So, we went with standard Douglas fir, with 2×12 sides and 4×4 posts to support the corners. I don’t know how long it will last, and we didn’t want to put any chemical stain or water sealer on something touching food that we’re trying to grow as organically as possible. We saved a lot of money by using Doug fir, but yeah, we know they won’t last as many years.

Design Choices

We wanted to be sure we could easily reach across each bed for plant care, weeding, and harvesting, so we made them all 30″ wide. Most are five feet long. And with 2×12 boards, they are 11 1/2″ deep.

The corner post is just to make a solid corner structure; it doesn’t extend down into the ground. I used 3″ deck screws to screw the planks into the posts, but this is where I’d now make a change… Some of the planks have warped away from the posts, creating a gap where some soil can wash out, so I think it would have been better to use some kind of metal corner bracket to tie the planks together in the corners. If that was sturdy enough, I wouldn’t have needed the 4x4s at all.

Keeping Critters out From Below

We’ve had a few gophers in the lawn before, so we didn’t want to take a chance on letting them destroy our veggies. We bought “hardware cloth” or gopher wire, a strong metal mesh, and stapled it to the bottom of each bed before laying it in place.

That complicated the next step a little. I needed to level the ground under them, especially since we have five in a row in the back garden and three in a row in the front, and we wanted them to look neat and well laid out. With the wire stapled to the bottom, it was just a little more work to get things level enough underneath. I did enough digging under the high corners and filling a little under low corners to level them out. 

Here’s one of my cute kids, lending a hand on construction day:

Keeping weeds out from below

We also didn’t want to spend a lot of time digging out all the sod or weeds under them, so we laid cardboard as a weed barrier that will deteriorate and disappear over time. The cardboard went in on top of the wire, laid out after the leveling. Apparently, the use of cardboard is much celebrated in garden forums, but disputed by some who say it creates a gas barrier, not allowing oxygen into the soil below. I didn’t care, though, because these have plenty of soil in the bed, and the roots of veggies don’t need to go deeper than that. The cardboard will be decomposed soon enough, anyway.

Placement

I’m a big fan of people growing vegetable gardens in their front yards, and I’m always a little pissed when I hear about cities or HOAs fining people for doing it. I think veggie beds can be beautiful. We decided as part of our front garden redesign (a post will come soon on that) that we’d put some veg beds out there, so we have three there and five in the back/side yard (behind the fence). It was a good use of unused space in the side yard, which is on the north side of the house, but we watched the sun/shade line progress as spring came on to be sure there would be full sun for the beds. Glad it worked out!

Soil choice

We filled them with about 9-10 inches of garden topsoil – a medium-light blend of loam, compost, and maybe a little sand from a local sand and gravel place. It’s OK, I think. I added a basic granular veggie fertilizer to make sure it’s fertile enough. We also put a top dressing of “organic compost” from the same supplier, but I wouldn’t use the same product again – it’s too fine, and it drifts around when watering, and it clings to the veggies and fruit that touch the soil, like strawberries and squash. Next time, I would use something with more bulk, probably a compost that has plenty of small wood chips. Maybe even just wood chips or shredded bark. We did put shredded cedar all around the backyard raised beds, as you can see in one of the photos above. That has created a really nice area for foot traffic, with no mud. We still have a bag of cedar left, so I should put some in as a top dressing, especially around the squash, since some of the little crookneck squash babies have started to rot where the squash rests on the compost and gets coated with wet compost when we water.

Plants!

Finally, on to the most important part! We have filled the beds with:

• Raspberries at the back of each bed in the backyard. Alternating beds with Encore red and Anne yellow varieties, ordered from Stark Brothers. I’m finding that the Encore are coming up from the bare root starts much better than Anne, which have been skimpy and struggling to thrive.
• Tomatoes in almost every bed, including: Sweet 100, Sungold, Early Girl, some Roma variety, and a couple of plants my brother-in-law wanted, including some big beefsteak kind and another cherry tomato.
• Two seedless watermelons (ironically, planted from seed :) )
• Three Connecticut Field pumpkins. We may cull this down to two.
• At least four yellow crookneck squash and four zucchinis (I think Black Beauty is the variety).
• Six cucumbers, including a lemon variety and some standard ones.
• A bunch of Sequoia strawberries, in three of the beds.
• Two types of bush beans — Royal Burgundy and Blue Lake.
• A bed dedicated to sauce herbs, including green onions (scallions), thyme, oregano, Italian parsley, cilantro, and a sweet red pepper.
• Oh yeah, we have several sweet peppers, including red and orange varieties (I should check out their names and come back here to add them).
• Scattered here and there in the beds are some clumps of calendula and marigolds we planted directly from seed. Those should add to the beauty this summer.

That’s a lot of stuff! Most of it will all come ripe in July and August, so we’ll have a lot going on then. I hope it all survives!

Irrigation

Oh yeah, I said I’d talk about irrigation. This is still pending. We’ve been watering by hand, but then after changing some sprinklers in the front yard, those three beds are getting some water from a lawn sprinkler (or two or three). I’m not sure that’s ideal, but we’re still finding our way with the front yard redesign, and we’ll make changes if needed. There is a pipe ready to be used for drip irrigation that runs along all these raised beds, so we may hook that up with soaker hoses. Still to be determined!