Materials for a raised flower/garden bed

[jtdirt]

Does anyone have good suggestions for what I can use to raise my
garden bed - i.e.; 2x4's, railroad ties, etc? And where in Hampton
Roads would be a good place to find these things? Tx!

[usefulgardener]

We built our raised beds from old 4x4" landscape timbers scrounged
from other uses. When we need new beds, we've sometimes been able to
find less-than-perfect 8-foot landscape timbers available for less
from the home improvement stores. Ditto end-of-season specials. Since
we don't care if the raised beds are "perfect", these work fine. Watch
out for telepone poles, railroad ties or any of the materials that
have been treated with creosote or arsenic decay preventers.

We drill the ends with 1" holes and run rebar down through them as
they are stacked. The rebar keeps the entire bed anchored at each
corner. We've also used premade metal plates designed to hold boards
together at a corner to build each layer and stacked the rectangles on
top of each other. Kind of like the toy "Lincoln Logs" (remember
those?).

We have used 2x10" boards but these have become expensive. Friends
have raised beds built from recycled concrete blocks placed without
mortar, which look pretty nice, actually. They even plant the open
"holes" in the top blocks.

I was recently checking on the project to replace the front lawn of
the San Francisco City Hall municipal building with edible gardens -
yes, it's a collaboration between Slow Food and Alice Waters (http://
www.sfvictorygardens.org/cityhall.html ) and I thought it was really
interesting that they build the raised beds with sandbags. They
really don't look bad and will look just fine when some plants start
spilling over the sides.

I wonder what you might find if you put a request in on the Hampton
Roads Freecycle site? I don't have the link handy, but if you go to
the www.freecycle.org and just follow the instructions you'll get
there. You have to join the group, which just means creating a user
name and password, to view the stuff being swapped. It's a great
recycling effort and really going strong across the US.

Sybil

[Adam Filipowski]

I used cinder blocks (stacked w/o mortar) with great success

[usefulgardener]

A quick heads up for all of us raised bed builders -- Home Depot has
8' landscape timbers perfect for raised beds on an outside display for
$1.99 each. I plan to scarf up a load in my trusty minivan. The wood
is "treated", but I just attended a wonderful presentation by Dr. Andy
Hankins of VSU (he's our VA specialist in alternative agriculture) and
Andy says treated lumber is actually pretty safe, just watch out
making new cuts as apparently that's where the chemicals tend to leach
out. News to me, but I trust him - he does more with organic and
alternative farms and growers than anyone else in the state. I still
think I might put a plastic liner in the raised bed, between the soil
and the wood.

Has anyone found a good source for compost or great soil that folks
can buy for filling raised beds? We just filled a friend's new 4x8'
raised bed with bags of the Organic Soil available at HD, along with a
couple bales of peat moss and the chopped leaves she's been saving.
It would've been better to do all this in the fall and have the bed
settled and ready now, but one does what one can. We've been at
loose ends since the SPSA compost facility stopped production, which
is a real shame. If you've got some good ideas on what to use to fill
beds, please share!

[william....@jfcom.mil]

JT,

I just built two new, 2' by 8' raised beds out of untreated 2 X 6
boards with true 2 in square corner posts extend into the ground about
4 inches. I had read numerous blogs/notes about the various materials
that can be used (cedar, redwood, treated, untreated), but one article
that I read from a gentleman up in the Northeast said he used
untreated lumber 7 years ago and it's still holding up! What so I
have to loose from trying, right? Gardening is an experiment anyway,
and every experiment is going to have some level of failure if new
things are tried. ;-)
Besides, my woodrack is still going strong after 10 years of contant
use and it's made out of untreated studs.

As a past manager at a HD store, I can confirm that the preservative
that is used in our wood products was changed several years ago and
you shouldn't find the more carsenagenic lumber in the store anymore.
And yes, when you do make cuts, you are exposing "untreated" lumber to
external forces. Typically, any board will most likely have a core
section that goes untreated, so any trimming/cutting/drilling will
probably result in some fresh wood being seen. You can always treat
these limited areas yourself if you want to. And as Sybil has said
before, there's numerous other products that you can use for
appearance as well as function.

Anyway, back to my beds, I made them only 6 inches tall. My veggies
are mostly shallow rooted, with fingerling carrots being the deepest
at 3-4". I did loosen up the underlying clay/soil with a garden fork
to assist with drainage and in the wild opportunity that I do get a
mutant root or two that burrows real deep. I used a mixture of
organic soil/humus/manure...we'll see what type of results I have this
year. I had thought about trying the composted topsoil that you can
get at the SPSA landfill, but didn't know if it was safe for
consumable gardening or not. My flowers love it!