Rasied Garden Bed

Here's Dad standing near the future site of our 3x16 ft raised garden bed.  We spent a while at Home Depot picking out our lumber, then about half an hour trying to tie it to the roof of the van.

Materials Used

• (2) 2x10 x16' lumber
• (2) 2x10 x3' lumber
• power tools
• (16) exterior deck screws (about 2" long) we ran into problems with this, see below

The idea was to simply butt-join through the wide face of the 3-foot piece.

Actually, I wanted to butt-join through the wide face of the 16-foot, but that would have been much harder!  I wanted the extra width to get the extra volume; but three feet is at the limit of my comfortable reach.

We had two problems arise:

1. the screws weren't long enough
2. some of our lumber was a little cupped and crooked.

Because these were the longest best screws we could get a large pack of (yes we're so picky, right?), we solved this problem by drilling about an inch into the 3-foot pieces where the screws would go.

I tried had a photo with the screw laying against the width of the wood for comparison, but it turned out too blurry.  As noted above, the screw is only half to an inch longer than the width.

Drill four one-inch screw "tunnels" where the screws will go (I eyeballed it).  Pre-drill the screw holes.  Screw the screws.

We managed pretty well for the first three corners.  Then we got to the last corner.  It was about three inches out of alignment.

Since our wood was warped, getting the surfaces flush against each other was rather difficult for the last joint. We ended up brute-forcing it (ie: Dad drilled while I put all my weight against the board trying to level it out).

(Right: Charlie hard at work!)

Surprisingly, it worked, kinda.  The joint ended up going where it was supposed to go, but we couldn't do anything about the cupping; so there's roughly 1mm between the two surfaces.

Dad wants to fix this using a small triangular piece of wood in the corners.  Will update.

The finished bed:

For those who haven't seen our back yard, here's a shot of our gala apple tree!

Oh, and while taking out the old wood from our old garden bed, I found black ants.  Augh.  And hanging out with them (or eating them?) was this juicy, fat centipede!  And an earth worm.  All the bugs left by the time I got my camera, but here's where they were partying:



Augh.  Centipedes.  I know they eat weevils, but augh, it was huge.  I hope that means I won't have any problems with weevils!

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