Adventures in Gardening - Part II. Raised Garden Boxes

Last year we tried gardening in pots. Didn't work out so great! So, this year, we are going to try our hand at raised bed gardening. It will definitely be a learning experience if nothing else!

We asked the deck builders if they would carefully disassemble our deck rather than just tear it down and save the wood for us, that we had big plans for it! We have a few projects that we are planning on using it for, the first being these gardening boxes. When we are finished with all of the projects, we will have used pretty much everything but the posts of the old deck!

We used the floor joists of the deck for the planter boxes because they are treated cedar. So they won't rot being used with water and soil, and pests apparently stay away from cedar naturally. We had JUST enough for the boxes, but that meant even the laminated ones had to be pried apart so we could use them!

There were screws in them that were VERY difficult to remove. It would've taken all day to take them out by hand! So...

We decided to grind them off! Took just a couple of minutes per board.

Here they are, all of the boards cut and ready to be assembled into boxes.

We had to make six frames. There will be 3 boxes, made of 2 frames stacked per box. This was us moving them over and over trying to figure out where to place them.

We used concrete stakes to anchor the boxes to the ground and attach the stacked frames to each other. Next, it's time to get dirty!