DIY Raised Bed Vegetable Garden - The Little Frugal House

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You don’t have to own a huge piece of land to grow a vegetable garden. If you have a backyard, or even just a 5 foot x 5 foot open space, you can grow a garden!

We have grown tomato plants and herbs in pots before, but this year we opted for a raised bed so we can grow more vegetables!

Raised beds are becoming more and more popular as they save space and are easier to maintain. I’ll show you how we made ours, and hopefully you can add a raised bed to your yard and grow your own produce!

We’ve planted tomato plants, okra seeds, carrot seeds, cucumber seeds, and lettuce seeds. I can’t wait to watch everything grow and eat from our own garden!!!

You can build your own Raised Bed Vegetable Garden, too!

Measure the space you have available to determine what size raised bed you would like. Common sizes are 4’x4′, 4’x8′, 5’x5′, 5’x10. You can make two, three, or four smaller beds and make a grouping. You want to make sure you can reach everything easily to plant, weed, and pick.

We decided for our space to make one big raised bed sized 8’x10. We did have to add a walking board in the middle so we are able to reach everything, but we’re ok with that.

Supplies:

Wood – 2″x10″x(whatever length you choose) x (however many boards you will need) – We chose two 8′ boards and two 10′ boards.
Nails/screws – use what you have – We used our air compressor and nail gun, but a hammer/nails will work too.
4 pieces of square scrap wood – 9″ length – These are to nail in each corner to help the bed keep it’s shape.
Water sealer/stain
Newspaper or Weed Blocking material – We used newspaper
Dirt
Vegetables/seeds

Instructions:

Build your frame. I would build this in place if you can. Attach all four sides with nails/screws.
Add corner pieces.

We had scrap 4″x4″ pieces that we cut down to 9″ and nailed in the corners to help brace the frame.
Water Seal or Stain the boards, inside and out.

This will help protect the wood from rotting. We used Thompson’s Water Seal. 4. Add newspaper to the bottom.

This will help prevent weeds from growing up into your garden. You could also buy weed blocking fabric, but we went with the frugal option of newspaper.

5. Add the dirt.

We had some great topsoil to use. Spread the dirt even with the top of the boards. (It rained and turned to mud on us!) 6. Add your vegetables and seeds!

We set our plants around trying to figure out the best placing. Use the instructions on the seed or plant packet. 7. We added a board in the middle so we can walk across and reach everything.

We cut it to length and nailed it down on both sides.

From the front looking back, we have tomato plants (read you should plant them on the north side so they don’t shade everything else.), carrots to the right of the tomatoes, then 2 rows of okra. On the other side of the board, we split it in half with cucumber and lettuce.

8. Wait for everything to grow!!!!!!!

This may be the hardest part!!!!

This really wasn’t too hard of a project. You can easily build this in an afternoon!

Just decide what size bed you would like, get your supplies, build your frame, and fill with dirt, vegetables, and seeds!

And how cool is it that you can just head out to your garden and gather vegetables to feed your family?? We built our raised bed close to our patio, where we hang out often. We can keep an eye on it, see when it needs watering or picking, and enjoy the view of watching our garden grow!

Update 7/10/2017: Everything is growing so fast and we love seeing what is ready to pick each day!!

We love homegrown tomatoes!