THE RAISED BEDS ARE FINISHED!

!!! They’re installed! And just in time for some spring planting!

We made these out of cedar (2x4’s for the sides and 4x4’s for the posts). They are made to the specs from the final design in my vegetable garden design post, except these are 14” tall instead of 18” tall. My stepdad is a carpenter so he sourced the cedar and built these for me in about 4 hours. The cost for the cedar and stainless steel screws was about $600, in case you’re interested in doing this yourself. It took us an additional 2 hours to get them level-ish and attach them to each other. And they look amazing! The cedar will gray over time (as will our fence). There is also plenty of room to move around and perch your tush on the edge to do some planting.

I lined the beds with landscape fabric because I have some pretty bad weeds in this area that I don’t want to deal with. With the soil being about 12-14” deep I think I’ll have enough room for most of my crops, but if anything needs more room than that then I can plant in-ground in this vegetable garden space as well. I pinned in the landscape fabric with landscape staples, mostly to keep it from flapping around in the wind before the soil was dumped in.

Now on to the soil. I originally was going to buy bagged raised bed mix but 1. it was hard to find the one from Espoma that I wanted and 2. it would have cost $500+ to fill the 50 cubic feet and I’m not about that expensive life. So, I did some research on a good blend for raised bed mix and called around to get quotes on bulk soil. I ended up with a combination of 65% premium topsoil (which has a bit of compost in it) and 35% mushroom manure. I needed 2 yards of it and it cost $110, including delivery to my driveway. We moved it via wheelbarrow into the raised beds. The 2 yards filled the beds completely but I’m sure the soil line will go down by next spring and I can amend with bagged soil and compost as needed.

And those are the raised beds! We still have to install the pathway and prep the hill side of the garden, but the raised beds were priority #1 this spring.