Building a Raised Garden #1

After living in Continental #5 with the Saunders clan there are certain things that just rub off on you: lack of showering (thanks Randy), comical sense of humor and having people call you the doctor (thanks Davey), and do it yourself projects around the house with Norm Abrahams (thanks Gary).

With our new house, we are doing some new projects around the house. First project was to build a raised garden bed. In texas the soil is terrible, the grass roots go about a half inch deep, then you run into a bed of clay with a bunch of rocks. No the most ideal for the garden of my dreams. So our solution was to build a raised garden bed.

So if you are interested in doing this here is a step by step process.

Step 1: Build the frame

- decide how big you want your garden. We decided to go with a 8x4.

- decide how deep you want it. We went with 12 inches deep because we didn't want to use rocks and clay in our garden, so with a deeper base we can get good roots.

- While some on-line sites say you should stack two 2x6's on top of each other, it was cheaper and easier to go with one 2x12. I went down to Lowe's and picked out a 2x12x16 and had them cut it at the 8ft mark. Thus i was able to get all the wood for $30 and they cut it for me.

- while at Lowe's i also picked out some patio screws, galvinized style. I would totally recommend going with a galvinized screw, for obvious reasons (I have no idea what galvinized means). But i would say go with a screws instead of nails, much easier to put it together.

- After getting it home it was time to put the frame together. I enlisted the help of my 5 year old and 2.5 year old. I helped them drill a lead hole (about 1/8) which looked about 2/3 the size of the screw. By drilling a lead hole you are less likely to split the wood when you drill the screw in..

-with the lead holes drilled, it was easy to drill in the screws. And with that the frame was done.