Project : Garden Boxes

Today's musing will on a practical note. For the past few years, I have had a raised garden bed in my back yard. I never had a chance to fully define the garden edges, and it was difficult to find specific edges when the tomato plants are overgrowing everything.

My goal when I first had the load of dirt delivered was to box out the gardens. 2 and a half years later, I finally have the money, and free time to do so. This is mostly because I took up smoking cigars and don't smoke in the house. So when you're outside for an hour or longer a day, you get to looking at your outside projects. So I planned out what I was going to do and went to Lowe's.

And I bought enough wood to build two garden boxes. 6 foot wide, 12 foot long, and 13 inches high. I got six 2"x6"x12' boards, six 2"x8"x12' boards, and two 2"x6"x16' boards. As well as two lbs of 2-1/2" star drive deck screws. The boards were untreated pine. Total cost ~ $150

I cut them down to six foot and eight foot lengths, and took them home. I then took the 6" wide boards and cut two of them down to 3 foot lengths. and took the 16' boards and cut them down to uprights and posts.

As you can see from the picture above, I made two 12' walls. The lower board was the 8" board, and was two 6' lengths laid end to end. The upper board was the 6" board, and was a 3' length, 6' length, and 3' length laid end to end. The first, third, and fifth posts were 44" boards cut at a 45 degree angle in the middle, giving an overall depth of ~11 inches into the ground. The third board provided a way to anchor the bottom board's 6' lengths together. The second and forth posts were 13", and were just to anchor the top boards 3' length to the middle 6' length. All attachments were done with the 2-1/2" deck screws with pre-drilled and countersunk pilot holes.

Installing the first wall was a learning experience. The first thing I learned was that you need to dig post holes, no matter what. Even at a 45 degree point, the post will not be going into the ground with any kind of ease, even with a sledge hammer. You're more likely to break the post, or the screws connecting the post to the wall. After I figured that out, the first wall was easy to install. I then fastened the lower board on the end caps. These were screwed onto both the upright and the wall itself.

The next part was installing the second long wall. This took a lot longer because of the dirt that was already present. It took a lot of raking and shoveling to move dirt out of the way, and dig the holes for the posts to be close to level with the first wall. In the end, it wasn't quite level with the first wall, but it was close. I attached the end cap to the second wall, and raked out the dirt in the garden box.

a side view

An end on view

A better view of the end cap.

As you can see, I bought enough lumber for two boxes, but only built one. I wanted to test the design first, and work out any issues I had. I learned a lot on the first box. I know that the first box is not 100% level from one long wall to the other. But I also know that I can walk on the edges and it will support my weight without any hint of moving. I wound up using exactly all of the screws in the first box of deck screws, including breaking a couple of screws during the installation of the first long wall. I have a better sense of what I will need to do to make the second box level and easier to install.

Overall time for the first box : completed in 5-6 working days.

Planning, measuring and cutting : done in one day, over 3 hours.

Assembly of the long walls : ~1 hour each.

Installation of the long walls: ~6 hours total

Installation of the end caps: ~1-2 hours

Total time in hours : around 12 hours.

All work was done by myself, without any additional help. I just started working on the second box by cutting the lumber into the component sizes. And was able to do that in under an hour, mostly because I had all of the measurements I needed and planning done already from the first box. I expect the time to assemble and install the long walls to be cut in half, taking hopefully 4-5 hours to build and install. The biggest consumer of time is going to be moving the dirt out of the way to install the second long wall.

I hope this has been helpful or inspirational. The next carpentry projects I will be working on are a set of stocks for the Spring Faire in May.