Raised bed building day!!
My mother definitely deserves much more credit than she gets for helping me bring to life all my crazy ideas. Mid-afternoon today we left the brats with my father and sister and took off to Lowe's. With Ana White's blog post in mind about how to cheaply and quickly make a raised bed, we took off towards the cedar fence pickets.
We found them just as she mentioned for $1.59 a piece which was nice since we knew that we needed 24 of them for the amount of beds that we were looking for. Without thinking about the exact dimensions of the beds we spoke about wanting to make four raised beds to handle all of the plants that we wanted to experiment with this year. We found the 1'' and 2'' screws as well and we were on the way.
Ripping the fence pickets down to 1x2's was a scary time with a table saw. Too many stories about people with now missing limbs have made me weary of that tool. I wish that we would have figured out before ripping them that we were going to greatly differ from the plan.
Her idea of how to make raised beds is a good idea. Her subsequent blog post and description leave something to be desired. And her photo of how to put the boards together is sub par at best. I am going to show an equally lacking photo but I am not expecting anyone to follow my directions to reconstruct these beds.
We put almost the entire bed together before we realized that her idea works in theory but in practice it probably was best if built another way. Corry showed up and saved the day. We ended up removing the braces that she calls for on the outside of the boards and went a new direction using scrap wood that was originally in 2x4 form and ripped it down to 2x2x11.
This is the basics of how our beds look right now.
All sides are two fence pickets stacked on top of one another and screwed in with 2'' screws. It's certainly not the most pretty looking thing but it will definitely be more than functional. These are the dimensions on the first one. The two others will be half as wide at 1x6x17.5 which were the original dimensions from Ana's blog post. I am experimenting with both and will decide which one I like better.
I haven't been this excited about a household project in awhile. I don't know what will succeed and what will fail miserably, but I am definitely psyched to try it out. We are currently growing onions, two different kinds of tomatoes, jalapenos, oregano and parsley in our kitchen window that were already potted. The oregano so far is the only thing that is just looking sad. The tomatoes, onions and parsley have taken off and are growing insanely fast. We also got a seed starter container today so I can start my seeds that we bought a few weeks ago - I am super excited about that part for some reason. The only item left is a second blueberry bush since we need the cross pollination from two different types of blueberries.
We are currently building the beds at mom's house since the table saw is there, but my next post will include pictures of the installation of the beds and later the planting.
-Sara
No comments:
Post a Comment