You need to avoid these six mistakes when building your raised garden beds or boxes.
Building your own raised garden beds can be fun and also give you sense of accomplishment. However, when they come apart, do not work as planned, or generally do not meet your expectations – it can be really frustrating.
Here are the lessons learned and things we did to make better diy raised garden boxes.
Want to see how we built our raised garden boxes?https://projectspierce.com/raised-garden-boxes/
Avoid these 6 DIY raised garden box mistakes
Corner blocks in your garden beds
If you have searched for images of raised garden beds on any social media platform, you have likely seen pictures with 4×4 posts on the inside of the garden box corners. Like this:
If you plant using the “Gardening by the square foot” method, corner blocks reduce space you can plant with in each of the corners. The result is you lose space options and limit your layouts.
Do you want to add shade for your boxes? Corner blocks take the space where you create an anchor for a shade covering. You will end up losing more space inside your raised garden bed for planting. Using rebar and PVC pipe a shade covering for the raised garden can be created [future post link here] without anchoring it outside of your hard made garden boxes and creating an eye sore.
Planting perennials in garden beds, plants or vegetables, the first year. The soil settles!
We learned this one the hard way. After building and filling [future post link here] the raised garden box, we planted strawberries. We love strawberries, even thougth it takes a year to get them established. So into the box for strawberries they went! We did not take into account that all that dirt in the box will settle. As a result of the settling they dropped about 4-6 inches giving them less sun. We had to dig up our beloved strawberries. Add more dirt. Then re-plant the same strawberry plants.
Gratefully the strawberries are doing well and everything turned out okay, but doing the extra work could have been avoided with a little patience on our part by waiting a year to plant perennials in that box. Instead we should have planted a one season vegetable and then planted perennials in year two after topping off the boxes with soil.
Not securing the weak points of your raised garden box
Secure the weak points, use plenty of screws. Go overboard on screws. They are cheap and using them every two inches where wood meets wood will hold the box together from all the weight of the soil pushing out on the box.
Not using finish screws for the outside of the raised garden box
This one is purely aesthetic, but seeing a bunch of screwheads on our raised garden boxes that we just put so much effort into, was not an option for us.
Cutting metal more than you need too is a mistake
If you are using sheet metal in your garden box, know that it doesn’t cut as easily as wood. It is a lot more flexible which makes cutting straight lines more difficult. We found that tin snips are the easiest cutting method and are best in short runs. Build you box in mind with the dimensions of the metal you will be buying to save yourself cutting the metal more than you need too.
Building to the outside of the raised garden box dimensions
Whatever your design, you will very likely be using a 2×4 or 2×6 dimensional lumber. Make sure to build with the INSIDE dimension of your garden box in mind, not the outside. You can lose valuable gardening real estate by building to the wrong inside dimension. the 2 by wood is 1.5 inches. If you accidently build to the outside of the box you will be losing 3 inches of space times the entire length and width of the box.
Building your own raised garden box or garden beds can be a lot of fun and very rewarding. Just keep in mind a few simple mistakes commonly made in raised garden beds as you do.
If you would like to see how we built ours, see below.
