Cedar Raised Garden Beds on the Cheap

Pinterest is not a total waste of time. So far, I have used at least three ideas for my own purposes and here is one that I am pretty proud of. 

The original idea came from a blogger in Alaska who used replacement cedar boards to make her raised beds. Somehow that translated in my head to a panel of cedar fencing. I'm not sure how that happened, but it was a happy accident because it ended up working pretty well.

I'm not doing a how to because I forgot to take "during" pictures.  Suffice it to say I special ordered one panel of cedar fencing (cedar, not treated which is poisoned or pine, which will rot).  It cost 89 dollars.  Looking for a pic today, I see they are on sale now for about 50. (facepalm).  The point is that it was a basic panel of fencing that looks like this on the back with three supports running horizontally.   Big thanks to our friend James who went to pick it up with Robb in his truck.

We pulled the supports off and cut some of the boards into two foot lengths for the sides of our boxes.  Then we cut the supports 16 inches long to be the corner pieces. We will bury the extra depth to keep them from blowing away in our weird Arkansas weather.

For our money, we got three 6 x 2 foot boxes that are 11 inches deep for about 30 dollars each. Compared to some of the kits we saw online (which were as much as 200 dollars a kit or more) I think it was a pretty worthwhile project. It took about three hours, but that was only really because our circular saw is sad and nearly unusable. If we had a more functional saw, I suspect they would have really only taken about 20 minutes each and also we would not be nearly as sore the next day....

I spent Tuesday gardening and got my first sun of the season.  I transplanted the blackberries and raspberries I had against the side of the house to make room for the raised beds. I moved two rosebushes and another bush from the front window where they don't get enough sun. I planted snapdragons, moved a section of chain-link fence, tried to work on our lousy front gate which is worthless, laid down weed-barrier under the new raised beds and around the air-conditioning units (no more weed-wacking the dang wires!) and mowed the back yard.  It was a thrill. 

Now we just have to plot with some of our garden friends to share a truck to get a load of compost for our raised beds.  And I just pinned a few other ideas I'm dying to try...