While everyone would love to work the land on their homesteads to make a nice garden to grow their own produce, that is often not easily possible due to poor soil conditions. So if your soil is too rocky, sandy, compacted, or devoid of soil life, you can still grow your food using a raised bed garden. While most garden centers sell premade raised beds, they are often too expensive to consider for large-scale gardens. So instead, I will show you how to make your own Raised Bed Garden for cheaper with a few tools and some elbow grease.
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I’m gonna cover two ways to make raised beds here. Both of the methods use 6-foot pressure-treated fence pickets. And before you all freak out about using pressure-treated lumber, this is all Micronized Copper Azole (MCA) lumber, which is safe to use, unlike the older arsenic-based pressure-treating chemicals. These pickets are cheap, around $2 a piece, and will last several seasons. For each raised bed, you will need 6 of these fence pickets with 4 of them left 6′ long and two of them cut into (2) 3′ pieces.
The first method uses premade concrete blocks and rebar to hold your wood planks in place. This method is the easier of the two but costs a little bit more per raised bed, costing about $31 for the 8 concrete blocks per raised bed. But it is a lot easier and can save you time compared to the second method, and the one I used, which uses wooden stakes instead to hold up the garden walls. For this method, find where you want to place your garden and start spacing out where you want your raised beds. I recommend at least a couple of feet between each bed. Place down the concrete blocks on each corner of the bed in a 3-foot by 6-foot rectangle for each bed. Then place your fence pickets into the block’s slots. Once you have the beds placed and assembled, take a piece of rebar and hammer that through the blocks into the dirt to lock them into place. For filling out the bed’s I will cover that later on in this article.
For the second method, you are going to get some wooden grade stakes. These are cheap, coming in packs of 12 for $8. As before, mark 3′ x 6′ rectangles where you will place your garden and hammer in the stakes at the corners of the rectangles. You want them driven in deep enough so they are secure and don’t move easily.
Once the stakes are in place, take your fence pickets and start attaching them to the posts. I used a nail gun to tack them into place quickly, then used wood screws to hold them into place more securely. Because fence pickets are thinner pieces of lumber they can warp over time, so do be aware that nails can eventually come loose.
Once you get the first layer of fence pickets attached, just repeat with another layer. If you want deeper raised beds, you can keep adding on layers of fence pickets, just be aware that each layer is 3 fence pickets.
Now that you have your raised beds built, it’s time to fill them with soil. While the big box stores offer bags of garden soil, it really is cost-prohibitive to fill out your whole beds using these bags. Instead, I recommend you go to your local landscaping or garden centers. They often sell topsoil in bulk for a lot cheaper per cubic foot.
So at the local landscaping supply, I got a whole truck bed full of soil for $35. About 40 cubic feet, which would have cost over $120 if I had gone with bagged soil. As a side note, I recommend you put a tarp down before having them dump the soil in. I forgot to, and it was a lot more work than needed to empty out the truck bed.
I forgot to do it here, but I recommend you put down a layer of cardboard or weed barrier before filling in your raised beds. This will help keep any grass from growing inside the raised beds in the long term. Saving you time when weeding the beds in the long run.
Once you get all the soil into the raised beds, it is time to prep the soil. While you think having a ton of organics in the soil would be good for a garden, it actually can be an issue in the long run, especially if you have hot, dry summers. If left to completely dry out, the organic material-rich soil can become hydrophobic. So even if you regularly water the garden and the top of the soil looks wet, inside the soil can still be very dry. So we need to add a few things into the soil.
First off, you want to add a couple of bags of play sand into each bed, and mix it well into the soil. This will help increase the drainage capabilities of the soil, letting the water absorb more readily into the bed.
After the sand, I recommend adding in some fertilizers to the soil before even planting anything. I used some worm casters and some organic granular fertilizers. Again, thoroughly mix them into the soil so they are evenly spread out. With granular fertilizers, make sure to water the raised bed to let it start releasing into the soil.
After you are done treating the soil and preparing it, you can plant whatever vegetables you want. I’ve had great success with alliums, cucumbers. and okra. Though not covered today, don’t forget to consider the cost of trellis systems and fences for your garden when planning your garden budget. Hopefully, if any of y’all build your own raised bed garden, you have a fruitful harvest this summer and fall.
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