I have been wanting to have a garden for a while now, but the problem is that I do not own a house. I live at my bosses’ house which means that I do not get to do whatever I want in their backyard. I planted mint twice, but the gardeners did not really understand that it was not weed. I got tired of buying and planting to get my stuff cut off. The idea of putting a bed raised garden on the grass was not an option as the backyard is already small, so I did no want to take 1/4 of it with my garden. I thought that a bed raised garden on wheels would be the best option. I can put it on the cement, and I can move it depending on wherever the sun is, and I can put it away if it bothers anybody.
I am not the type to build stuff, but I can figure out ways to fix stuff if I have some instruction. I looked up some bed raised garden online to see how it is made, and I made my own little plan.
The first thing is to buy the materials. As you can see on the picture this is all I bought at the beginning because I did not really know what I was going to do it yet. I ended up buying 5 x 3 ft pieces of wood because if you look at the finishing product I added a piece in the middle to make sure my bed raised garden would not break with the weight of the dirt.
For this part, I used 6 pieces of the 5 ft pieces that I nailed together with the 2 x 3 ft pieces. I put nails on both sides because once I picked it up I could feel that the pieces were coming off.
As you can see I left 1 in space, so I would have enough space to put everything together. I used nails that were long enough to go through both pieces of wood, but short enough so it would not go poke outside both pieces.
This is how to looks once I nailed everything together. You should do the same with the rest of the 5 ft pieces, so it looks like the picture below.
My mistake there was to put everything together before checking if the bottom part would fit. Once I nailed everything together and I put the bottom on top I realized that it was not fitting at all. My advice is that you get somebody to help you hold all the part together to see how you are going to nail the parts together, so the bottom can fit.
On the left it’s how it looked like when I finished it when I did not think about putting something in the middle to hold everything together.
On the left, it is how the bottom part looks like now. I thought about the weight of the soil (about 10 gallons), and I preferred to put another piece of wood with two extra caster to hold the weight. I fixed the casters with drywall screws which was easy to screw as the wood was pretty soft.
I recovered the wood with landscaping fabric found at Walmart.
This is the end result. I put cucumbers all around, lettuce and basil in the middle. I also put some cilantro, and eggplant see in the little pots.
Materials:
- Hammer
- Nails
- Drywall screws
- Wood ($10 at Home Depot) I put the dimensions on the first picture, but you decide how big you want your bed raised garden to be.
- Measuring tape
- Rubber swivel caster (here)
- Rubber swivel caster with brake (here)
- Landcape fabric (here)
I hope that this post will help you build your bed raised garden. I can tell you that I have never built something before (except Ikea furniture), so don’t be intimidated by it. Go for it, and you will have a beautiful garden at home which might save you some money.
