Happy Saturday everyone! One thing I’ve always wanted to do since buying a house was grow my own food. Just knowing where your food comes from, controlling what it grows in, what you put on it, and what it touches makes me feel so much better, especially when you have all these issues with contaminated veggies these days! You can’t be too careful. Our soil here is basically clay so growing a garden straight out of the ground was just not happening. So today I’m going to share with you how we created this super easy raised garden bed. We didn’t cut wood or even nail it together! It took less than 30 minutes and it’s held up quite well. We are on our second year in this garden and now that we actually paid attention to what plants do best together and how much room they need, we have a great garden going this year!

Where to Buy the Materials…

We bought everything from Lowes! When we were looking for the best way to build a garden, one of the employees told us about these bricks that fit a 2×6 perfectly. So we went to check them out and thought this would be the easiest way to build our garden without having to nail the boards together. We bought 12 bricks to make it a 2 level garden. For the wood, we had an idea of how big we wanted it and just had them cut the 2×6’s right there at Lowes. We then bought some rebar to make sure the bricks didn’t move, a whole bunch of soil (like a ridiculous amount. We used both top-soil and organic soil), and a bunch of veggies.

How to Build the Garden…

First things first, we had to pick the right area to put the garden. Our yard is pretty hilly so we decided to put it on the side of our hot tub fence where it was flat. You need to have a flat space or be able to dig out a flat space for this to work right. Next, we put the bricks down in the place we wanted it and just slid the boards into the bricks.

We used two levels of wood and bricks to make a higher garden. We then took the rebar and put it through each of the layer of bricks and made sure it went deep into the ground to anchor all of the bricks. Then that was it! Our garden bed was already made.

Instead of digging out all of the grass in the garden bed, I read somewhere online that you can just put cardboard boxes under it and it will kill the grass. It worked perfectly for us! I order way too much stuff online so we had a ridiculous amount of cardboard boxes so not only did it kill the grass, it gave us a great place to recycle all of our extra cardboard!

After making sure all of the ground was covered with cardboard, we started covering it with soil. We alternated top-soil and organic soil. We would’ve used all organic soil but we had to buy so much soil and the top-soil was so much cheaper so we decided to go this route.

Once all the dirt was in, we mixed it all together, decided where to put our plants and that was it! We had a garden. It took us a day to buy all the materials, put it together and plant them. Definitely worth it! I also found some cute garden decorations at the At Home store, Jo-Anne Fabrics and the dollar store. I of course can’t have an area that’s not decorated :).

Now just a couple more tips as you go to plan your garden, pay attention to what your planting! I was just so excited to have a garden my first year that I just grabbed what I wanted and decided to plant it without a second thought to how much room or what plants do best together. Our cherry tomato plants and baby peppers came out great but everything else did not do so well. This year we have 3 types of tomatoes, orange and red peppers, jalapeño peppers, basil and parsley and so far it’s doing great! There are a lot of sites online that will tell you what you plant together and what to avoid. Good luck and happy gardening!!