Raised Garden Beds

Spring is here which means its time for our favorite hobby of all: Gardening! Having moved to our new house in January, the weather wasn't exactly prime to start cleaning up the yard, start landscaping, and build the garden, but now that it has warmed up we are getting everything built up!

When we moved in, there were a few old, painted, mostly dilapidated raised garden beds in the backyard. They clearly hadn't seen much love in quite some time as they were overrun and quickly returning to nature. It was time for them to go so we pulled them up and cleared the space for new ones.

As per usual with our outdoor projects, we chose to make our raised beds out of cedar. We love the way it looks and smells and best of all its natural resistance to decay and pests. Its a little bit more expensive than other lumber choices but we are hoping that it will last longer than something like pine. We also don't want the chemicals in pressure-treated wood anywhere near the plants that we will soon be ingesting.

Raised beds are great for many reasons such as pest control, soil control, warmer soil, and better drainage. They also happen to be easy to build and are relatively inexpensive. We decided to build two different size beds. The larger beds are 6' x 4' x 1'. We like to keep the short side to a maximum of 4 feet so that everywhere in the box is accessible from no more than 2 feet away. This saves awkward leaning and reaching while tending to the garden.

The smaller beds are 8' x 2' x 1'. We went with 2 foot beds as these boxes are placed up against a fence and won't be accessible from one side. This allows us to keep that maximum of 2' reach at any spot in the box. We're hoping to utilize the fence behind these boxes as a trellis to help some of our veggies and flowers grow.

This year we are trying something we've never attempted before which is Hoop Houses. These Hoop Houses act as a green house for individual beds. This is great to get started a bit earlier in the season and hopefully extend later into Fall as the plants are able to stay warmer than if they were uncovered. The design of the hoop houses is also quite simple. We simply took 2' pieces of rebar and hammered them about half way into the ground at each corner of the boxes. We then took an 8' piece of 3/4" PVC conduit and placed it over top of the exposed rebar. Make sure to get the grey electrical conduit as it offers more UV protection than the white PVC and is roughly the same cost. Then simply bend the conduit into a hoop and put the other end over the matching rebar stake. For a shorter hoop you can cut the conduit to a shorter length. We then added a cross bar at the top of each hoop for extra support.

Since we built some beds against a fence we simply placed the rebar staked on the front corners of the bed and also an additional one in the middle. We placed the conduit on the rebar and then cut them down and tied them to the top of the fence.

We experimented with placing the rebar stakes both inside the box and outside of the box. While both ways work just find, we found that going outside of the box not only looks a lot cleaner, but it saves space inside the box and makes it easier to open and close. In the picture above, the hoop house on the left has the stakes on the outside and the house on the right has stakes on the inside. Doing it again, we will definitely opt to keep them outside of the boxes.

For the plastic we went 6mil UV Treated Polyethylene from Amazon. We went with the 10' x 25' roll as it is is slightly wider than our conduit which minimized the amount of cutting we had to do to shape it.  Once cut to size, we draped it over the hoops and clip them into place with spring clamps.

We like to keep our hoop houses open whenever its possible to allow for the best sunlight and to let the pollinators do their work. It is also necessary to open them when its starts getting warmer outside. We also like to open them in the rain to cut down on the watering we have to do. We usually like to close them back up pretty quickly when raining though as it can still get pretty cool here in the spring.

There are all sorts of opportunities for unique raised bed, simple or elaborate, fun accessories, trellises and hoop houses. Be sure to let us know what you've done in your garden. We're always looking for fun new tricks to try and want to post your ideas for all to see!