Our Garden Currently: How to make simple raised beds

Jeff mowing the area for the beds. Look at all those dandelions!

We've decided this year would be the year to transition from in-the-ground gardening to raised beds. When we first moved into the "Spider Cottage" (as we like to refer to our humble abode because of all the spiders we tend to find lurking about inside) here in Oregon there was a burn pile that the previous tenant had used to apparently burn wire, cans and other various nonburnable items, so it took us a bit to clean up the debris so that we could have a garden. We tilled the ground and then finally, last year, said forget it! Every turn of the dirt revealed some new, ridiculous treasure.

Going with raised beds was quite fun though because we made them all by hand and that alone was extremely fun. And once they were finished it was a sense of accomplishment and we stood and marveled over our creations. :-)

We built our raised beds with the board deminsions of 8 feet by 4 feet. These just worked best for what we were needing and also because of space.

We bought 3-8 feet long boards of pine and cut one in half for the sides and then brought them all together with all-weather large nails.

It took all of 3 hours to pull them all together, from the sawing to the hammering. We built 4 raised beds and plan on building 2 more possibly later on in a different area of the yard.