3 Easy Raised Garden Beds to Build This Season

You don’t need a raised garden bed to grow vegetables, but a raised garden bed does have a few advantages over planting straight into the ground:

• You can start fresh with good soil without having to worry about amending a depleted patch of ground.
• The soil in the bed will be warmer than the ground and you will be able to start plants sooner.
• Since the raised bed is higher off the ground, you can see the plants and any pests/problems a bit better.
• Main advantage in my opinion: you can smother weeds underneath instead of having to till or dig. Always place some cardboard or a very thick layer of newspapers (10 pages thick at least) at the bottom of the bed before you fill it to smother stubborn weeds and prevent them from coming up in your bed. **Don’t use plastic or mesh because you want your plant roots to wander down into the ground and you want worms to find their way up into your bed.

Here are 3 easy ideas for building raised garden beds:

1. Basic: 4 boards joined to each other with hardware (I use 3″ decking screws) and supported with a block of wood in each corner. These boards are 2″ thick and sturdy. I recently wrote about building 2 beds like this. You can see that post here.

• 2. No hardware required: 4 boards (or more) joined by these perfectly shaped bricks found at Home Depot and other home improvement stores. Simply level the area as best as you can, place the bricks in each corner (or joint) and slide the wood into the grooves on the brick. If you stack a second row of bricks to make a taller bed, you can drive some pieces of rebar into each corner to hold the blocks in place. For a single row, though, no rebar is necessary. I didn’t use rebar and the beds are very stable.

• 3. Concrete blocks (cinderblocks): This is the most labor intensive method but it is probably the cheapest one. Chances are you may even have some cinder blocks laying around collecting mud. If you were to build a 3’x 6′ bed that is 12 inches tall you would need approximately 24 (8x8x16″) cinder blocks (12 on top of 12). The average price per block is usually around $2, so the cost for one bed would be about $50. However, you would need to dig a small trench to place the first row of blocks and you would have to make it as level as possible so the next row of bricks will be steady. You don’t need to cement them but know that they will shift slightly over time and you will need to readjust them each year.