The Cheapest Garden Beds I Could Come Up With…

I’ve been moving a lot of dirt lately because it’s been so damn nice out here! And I figure it’s better to build the garden boxes now verses waiting until spring when I’ll be scrambling.
This is what our raised bed used to look like:

I mean when we got back from out year away they were overgrown with weeds. I called it my Rainbow Garden and had built it out of the ruined Pergo flooring from the basement that I pulled up after the 2014 Boulder Flood. It lasted pretty long if you ask me. And I personally liked it. But Rob really dispised it’s shotty craftsmanship. The posts weren’t dug in and only rested on top of the ground and I used nails not screws… So we tore it out this fall…

I spent ages scouring Pinterest for the best way to do some raised beds. I looked into redwood and cedar but it’s hard to find that at my salavage yard. It woulda taken ages for me to source enough material. I tried to get creative… maybe stones, or old metal garage door panels… but stones seemed like a lot of work and the garage door panels were still gonna be fairly expensive.

Then one day my boss, Clemente, told us that he needed to clean out the Trex section. And I asked him how much I could take 700 linear feet for. He thought about it for a second and said … “If you can keep that much out of our garbage dumpster you can have it for $20.” SOLD… I spent an entire day off working out in our lumber section sorting and collecting Trex. It was epic. That stuff is HEAVY. But it’ll last forever and from the research I did, won’t hurt my plants. I know it’s sawdust mixed with plastic but since most of this stuff is really old, it mostly done offgassing is what I figure… plus… $20?!

5 trips in the van later and I got it all back to the house. We’ll be able to fit 5- 8x4 beds, one 4x4 bed for my blackberry bush in the center that came up on its own accord, and then a 3x6 bed because that’s what fits. I also got extra to put some decking around our old hot tub pad and make that a more killer hangout space (future plans… gotta have em).

This is the first bed going in. I spent 2 days cutting all the Trex to size for the beds and Rob did the manual labor of digging the 4x4 posts (also sourced from ReSource) a foot into the ground. This is all in January… let’s just say the soil is not frozen!

First bed complete! And you can see how my reclaimed wood fence is coming along in the background!

We worked into the night on the 4x4 bed measuring it all out so that the boxes are even and level. Even the nights have been relatively warm so we could stay out and work like we would when it stays light until 9 in the peak of summer! We do need more lights in the backyard though…

A few days later and a few more boxes up!

For about $35 for the Trex, screws, and 4x4s from the salvage yard we have got some pretty sturdy, lifetime guarantee garden boxes. Now that’s what I’m talking about.

And then this showed up in the mail…

Oh goody! I get to start thinking about filling them up!