Another Little Space Saving Beauty for my Garden

My Husband and I always looking for ways to expand what little space we have in our garden.  Especially those areas that get at least 6 hours of sunlight in a day since that is the only place that growing anything makes any sense.  So I was looking on Pinterest (yes, I am an Addict - no intervention needed at this point) and found this amazing little stacked planting bed.  Sorry no picture but here is the link :)

Click here for the link see the site that sells that tiered gardening bed

I looked at the link,which was to a online store, and found that it was way over my budget and not only that it was made of cedar and I have this OCD matching everything issue.   So I stared at it for a long time - longingly - and realized that it was just a series of boxes stacked on top of each other.  Score!  I could do that - well actually Jeffery could do that but I make a great cheering section and besides I draw all the plans :)  See - looks amazing, right?!

Five tiers to plant in (your looking at strawberries). I put beets and herbs in the top two. It works well in our little space and I got to determine the size of the tiers rather than having something that was pre-made for me that I would be struggling to fit into my space. And I matched it (OCD issue resolved) to my square foot garden beds by using 2" x 8" redwood. It should last for a long time.

Put the whole thing on landscaping cloth and then surrounded it with bark chips to clean up the area. LOVE IT!

 

It was easier than we thought.

Your going to need 8 - 2" x 8" x 8' and 1 - 2" x 4" x 8' (we were only able to find the 2" x 8" boards at Lowes) and a box of 2 5/8" Deck Screws

For tools you will need something to cut the boards with (we used a circular saw)

and an electric drill (to do the pre-drill so that the boards won't split when putting in the screws)

and electric screw driver

You cut the boards thus:

5 of the boards need to be cut in half (exactly as possible) these are the fronts and backs of each of the boxes you will be building

The sides are as follows:

You need:

2 - 48"

2 - 36"

2 - 28"

2 - 19"

2 - 10"

We were able to combine the 36" board with the 10" and the 28" boards with the 19" so all of the above only used 3 boards.

Finally cut the 2 x 4 into 2 approximately 40" lengths - there will be a bit left over.

 

 

 

 

Then comes assembly:

We put the boards in so that the sides went butt up against the ends. That way we knew that the width of the box would be a uniform 4'. We pre-drilled all the holes (2 in each board) and then assembled with the deck screws.

After assembling the boxes we started stacking them just one at a time with the two 2" x 4"'s in the back corner with the narrow part of the 2" x 4" against the back wall and the wide part against the side.  Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of that.   Again we pre-drilled and then screwed it together. Continue the stacking and screwing to complete the assembly. A nice plus in doing it this way is that it squared itself as we screwed it into the 2" x 4" board.

 

Finally, it takes a lot of dirt to fill this so we put our heavy clay soil in the back of the unit until it was about 1/2 full being careful not to get any in the front part then we bought garden soil (I don't remember the brand) and it took about 6 - 3 cubic ft bags to fill it.

 

I have now had my first season with the box.  We added some supports for netting since our happy birds were massacring our new sprouts.  I had my husband anchor them to the box after I looked at this picture and realized how wonky they looked.  I love it.  I especially love the herbs in the back so that I can easily go around the back and snip a few when I'm cooking.

 

 

See my Potato box on the side - yup that's for another blog :)