How to Make a Simple & Cheap Raised Bed

Today we're going to be building a simple and low-cost raised bed out of materials that are inexpensive and easy to get. Hi, I'm Brian with Next Level Gardening. If you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips, tricks, and support to help take your garden to the next level, you're in the right place. Get started now by clicking subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss anything. Now let's get growing. There are some times when raised beds are a was bare soil here and there but almost all in shady areas. In one spot that had full sun, it was a large 20 foot by 20 foot cement slab. Now I could have broken it up and had it hauled off and that would have been backbreaking work and a lot of money. So I decided I would build raised beds on top of it. Now here I've got plenty of full sun and open ground but we've got gophers. So getting my vegetables up out of the ground and in raised beds where gophers can't get them was the easiest solution. But other than the obvious reasons, let me give you the other pros for growing in raised beds. Prevents soil compaction and it prevents plants getting squished by people or animals who don't stick to paths. You have a longer growing season with raised bed. They warm up more quickly in the spring allowing for a longer season. Raised beds also have better drainage. If you use a good growing medium in your raised beds, we'll cover that in a bit, raised beds allow the soil to drain better than an in-ground garden. And once they're established, you're saving money and materials because the gardening space is concentrated and well-defined and so the application of water, fertilizer, soil amendments, and mulch can be better controlled. Raised beds are also great for people with bad backs or people with disabilities. The higher the raised bed, the less leaning over you have to do. And this can greatly reduce the strain on your back after long days in the garden. Because of great drainage and a deep root run, you can plant more intensively and closer together, therefore being able to grow more crops in a smaller space. Let me know in the comments why you grow in raised beds or why you There are several types of raised beds that you can build or buy and they can be made out of just about anything. You can buy fabric raised beds like these. You can buy metal beds. I'll leave a link below to both in case you wish to go that route. And I've had good luck with all of these. You can use cinder blocks or stacked stones or bricks or in the simplest raised bed possible, you can just mound soil or compost up six or eight inches high, not have any borders whatsoever. It doesn't have to be an expensive process. And I want to add that I taught an online class for the School of Traditional Skills. It was a raised bed gardening class. If you're looking for a completely immersive class where every detail is covered, including vertical growing, irrigation, and extending your seasons all in raised beds, I'll leave a link to that below and you can check it out. While you're there, check out all the other classes, teaching other traditional skills our ancestors knew, and we really should to all taught by experts in their field. The next thing we need to consider is the depth of your beds. The bed we build today is going to be 12 inches deep. And this is a good depth if you're placing your bed on top of concrete or contaminated soil where the roots you don't want the roots going further than the bottom of the bed, or they can't in terms of concrete. If you have your bed on healthy soil, really only need your bed to be six to eight inches deep. So figure out what you've got going on underneath and make the right decision for that. Most vegetables have a root system that are concentrated in the top six to eight inches of soil, but their root systems can go down much further. So a six to eight inch bed on top of soil will give you a good well draining home for the main root system, but the full root system can also travel deeper as it needs to. Now if there is no soil under your raised bed or it's concrete or asphalt or the soil is contaminated, you really want to get your bed up to 12 to 15 inches deep. That depth is going to allow there to be sufficient root run for just about any crop you want to grow. And it's also going to keep your beds from drying out too quickly. If you're building your bed on concrete, asphalt, or contaminated or really weedy soil, you're going to need a plastic barrier between the soil and the substrate. And you can find rolls of plastic at your local hardware store or on Amazon, and you want to look for this symbol right here with a two or a four in it. These are safe plastics to use in this application. Number five is a third but less desirable choice. And you want to poke as many holes in the bottom for drainage as you can. One pencil size hole every foot or so is good if the bed is over contaminated type soil, but you might need more than that over concrete. And over concrete, it's also a good idea to punch drainage holes around the edges of the bed about four inches from the bottom. And the reason for that is on a hard bottom surface like concrete, the soil can press the plastic against the bottom and seal off the drainage holes. Thus, the ones on the sides will be a necessity so you don't end up with a raised bed pond. It's not all about the plants though. If you have a physical disability that keeps you from bending over for long periods, higher beds are going to be necessary for you to garden comfortably. And if you're in a wheelchair, higher beds will bring the garden up to your level of comfort. You're going to need paths between your beds so you can move through the garden without stepping into the beds. And paths should be at least two feet wide to allow for comfortable kneeling between the beds to work. If you're in a wheelchair, map out the paths in advance, especially the turns, so you'll know you'll have access to all points in the garden easily. So let's talk about bed size. You can make your raised beds any size or shape you wish. I will tell you that it's best if you keep the width of the beds narrow enough to allow you to reach into the center from both sides. You don't want to walk in your beds if you can keep from it. Four feet is a good average width for most people. If you have long arms like me, you might be able to push it to five. I'm going to make this bed four by eight feet. It's a good finish size, but you can also create a bed without waste. If you get three eight foot long two by sixes, that will create two sides eight feet long. If you cut the third board in half, you have two four feet boards. So that's the two ends. I'm using Douglas fir. I get questions all the time about pressure treated wood. Pressure treated wood has an ingredient in it, copper azole, which in my research is better than the arsenic they used to use. But if you're going to be organic, even copper azole isn't a valuable option. It can still leach into your soil and possibly into your food. Douglas fir will last five to ten years. Redwood a little longer, but it's also more expensive. Let's put it together. I'm using three inch deck screws. They're coated so they won't deteriorate outdoors. You want to put this together where the four foot board, the half of the eight foot, is the full width of the bed. So the longer sides would go inside of that. A couple screws on each corner should hold it together well. If the bed is longer than eight feet or taller than eight inches, you might want to consider a third piece of wood across the middle to keep the sides from bowing out. I live in an area with a gopher problem. If you have ground dwelling pests like gophers, this is the time to prevent them. I'm going to use half inch 19 gauge hardware cloth. This is not chicken wire. Chicken wire doesn't work for a couple reasons. First, the holes in it are big enough for some gophers to squeeze through. Second, it isn't strong enough and it can rust away in just a couple of years. Hardware cloth can last for a decade or even longer. I buy rolls that are four foot wide so again there's no waste. Now I find that staples from a staple gun are not strong enough and can deteriorate much quicker. So once you've got the corners stapled, you can run the length of wire down to the other end, staple the corners there, and then cut the wire to the right length. Now just go around the whole outside edge with those staples, maybe one every six to eight inches, and there's no way that a gopher is getting in. So flip the bed over, position it on flat ground. There is one downside to this method. Long root crops like carrots and parsnips will not have room to grow down. The wire will stop them. So you can either grow shorter varieties like the finger carrots or the round Parisian carrots. In this bed I'm going to be asparagus which needs to be planted deep. So I could have bought two by twelve lumber to use for the edging but it's actually more expensive than two two by six by eight. So what I'm going to do is just build a replica of this one minus the gopher wire and you can stack them as high as you want. Two, three, I'm going to join them at the corners and if the bed is longer than eight feet a couple of braces in the middle of two by fours about the height of the bed will keep those boards from bowing out. Now you could put a bead of caulking between the two layers to help keep the soil and water from escaping between the two boards. Like I mentioned before if you want to offer your bed some protection from the elements you can apply a coat or two of linseed oil with a paintbrush or a latex paint if you want to change the color like I did at my last house. They'll both protect the wood and give it a different look. Now this is a Mediterranean garden so the look I'm going for is just the natural aging process so I'm going to do nothing and we're ready to fill it up. Now this is where most of your upfront investment will be. You can skimp and get by on using free or repurposed materials to build the actual frame but what you fill it with is important and it's important to use quality organic soil and compost. Native soil alone is not going to be the best choice when it comes to filling your braised beds. I know it's tempting because it's free and it's right over there. If your bed is six inches tall or less you can use a 50-50 mix of your native soil as long as it's decent with compost or potting soil. Over six inches it needs to be a raised bed mix or potting soil mixture or like a mushroom compost that's been aged and the taller the bed the more heavy soil is going to compact under its own weight especially when you add water so that top soil that garden soil is going to really compress down and not give a good oxygenated space for your roots to grow. You're going to get a boggy soggy mess for anything that tries to grow on top of it. Now if it's more than 15 inches deep you can fill the bottom with organic material that will break down over the first couple years. This could be a mixture of straw and sticks and branches even logs in really deep beds, kitchen scraps, cardboard, newspaper, anything that is cheap or free and made of a that will break down. Just make sure that the top 12 inches is potting soil or compost only with no fillers. When watered and as it breaks down the soil level is going to get lower and will need to be topped up each year. So that's it a simple raised bed that can last you for years. If you learned something please give the video a thumbs up, consider subscribing, share it with a gardening friend and I'll see you next time.