In December of 2008, I built my first raised garden beds. I had just moved into this house. I had a lot of plants in containers from my previous place. My yard has a bunch of fruit trees and I didn't want to cut those down so I chose a section of yard along my south wall. It is not an optimum site since I don't get much of the afternoon light in most of the plot due to the shed and garage blocking that light. However, I decided to give it a try. I made good with what I had. My neighbor had some big furn trees that would block the morning sunlight so I talked with her and I cut those down to the wall height. That gave me a little more light.
Once the garden site was chosen, I removed all the grass for a 10' x 10' area. I then started building the garden boxes.
To do this, I purchased 5" x 6' redwood fencing material. I purchased decks screws. I searched the Internet for garden bed ideas. I settled on an idea of using 1' redwood 2x4s in four corners and using cut the fencing material to 5' long sheets. I then screwed these together. I built 4 open ended boxes. I then built 3' boxes using 2’ 2x4s and 2 5” wide redwood planks stacked to make the containers 10” deep. I layed the garden boxes out leaving a 2’ pathway between each garden box.
I have clay soil so I dug down 2 feet in each garden box and then bought a bunch of bags of fertilizer and garden bed soil. I used steer manure since it was pretty cheap and readily available.
In this picture you can see the reminents of my container garden. The container garden did fairly well at my previous place. Refer to my favorite links to see my container garden blog.
