There’s no disputing the facts – every medical authority in the world has made it clear. Fresh vegetables add essential vitamins, minerals and other nutrients to your diet. Fresh vegetables – the fresher the better – contain antioxidants that may help prevent cancer, lower your risk of developing type 2 diabetes and heart disease, and help build up your immune system. Unfortunately, fresh veggies are also expensive at the supermarket, and far too often, those perfectly uniform, uniformly ripe vegetables were grown using chemical pesticides or sprayed with preservatives to keep them looking so pretty.
When you grow your own vegetables, you know exactly what chemicals, if any, you’ve used on them. Because vegetables grown in your own backyard don’t have to be transported, you’re helping to reduce pollution, environmental contaminants and your carbon footprint. That’s not just healthy for you, it’s healthy for the whole planet. If that’s not enough benefits for you, here’s a few more:
• Kids are more likely to eat vegetables that they helped to grow.
• Working in your garden increases your physical activity, which can help you manage your weight and increase your mobility.
• Being outdoors in the sunlight is a powerful antidote to the blues, and may help strengthen your bones. Your skin converts sunlight to vitamin D, which is essential to helping your body absorb calcium.
• You can pick and choose vegetable varieties that suit your climate best, which are often varieties that you won’t find at the supermarket.
• Vegetables grown in your garden taste far better than those that you buy at a supermarket thanks to their freshness, and to the fact that the flavor hasn’t been bred out of them to keep them looking pretty.
• Eating your veggies is a lot easier when they’re right outside your back door or on the patio.
Raised bed gardening adds even more advantages into the mix.
• You don’t need to worry about your soil because you can fill the beds with your own soil and nutrient mixture. It’s far easier to mix up your soil than it is to dig lime, sand, peat moss and other amendments into your soil.
• Raised garden beds can lift the garden up to your level so you don’t have to stoop and kneel to tend it.
• You can build a ledge around the edge of your raised beds to afford comfortable garden seating for tending, or just enjoying your garden.
• Raised garden beds present a neat, manicured appearance.
Best of all, you can build your own raised beds for very little money even if you’ve never so much as picked up a hammer. This easy-to-assemble raised bed uses 4×6 landscape timbers cut to size and requires no nailing or screwing together. Since the timers aren’t permanently fastened, you can easily disassemble it at the end of the growing season and store the timbers in your garden shed, attic or garage until next season.
Here are the things that you’ll need:
4-foot by 4-foot fine-mesh landscape screen
16 4-inch landscape stakes
8 4×6 landscape timbers, cut to 4-foot lengths
Chalk or marker
16 lag screw eyes, size 0
4 24-inch round steel stakes
Hammer or wooden mallet
Here’s how to prepare the bed area:
1. Choose an area that gets at least 8 hours of sun daily. It should be at least 6 by 6 feet in area to allow you enough room to get around the edges of the bed when you tend it.
2. Roll out the landscape screen on the ground and stake it in place using the landscape stakes. This will help keep burrowing rodents out of your garden while letting in beneficial insects and worms.
How to prepare the landscape timbers:
3. Lay 4 landscape timbers side by side on the ground with a 6-inch side facing up. Line up the ends so that they’re all even.
4. Draw a line across all four timbers exactly 5 inches in from each end.
5. Measure up 2 inches from the bottom of each timber and make a mark on the 5-inch line.
6. Screw in a lag screw eye at each of the marks, leaving two inches exposed. Set the four timbers aside.
7. Lay the remaining 4 landscape timbers out in the same way.
8. Mark a line 2 inches from each end of the four timbers.
9. Mark a spot on each landscape timber 3 inches from the bottom.
10. Screw in a lag screw eye in at each mark.
How to assemble the bed:
11. Place two landscape timbers with 5-inch lines opposite each other on two sides of the landscape screen, with the screw eyes facing in.
12. Place two landscape timbers with 2-inch lines opposite each other on the other sides of the landscape screen, nudging them between the ends of the other two timbers to form a square. The screw eyes on each end should line up with each other, one above the other. Adjust the lag screws as necessary so that the holes in the eyes line up directly.
13. Position the remaining 4 timbers in place on top of the square, lining up the screws so that all four screw eyes line up with each other perfectly.
14. Slide a steel stake through the screw eyes at each end.
15. Hammer the stake into the ground until the top of it is below the top of the raised bed. For added safety, top each stake with a cap end.
That’s all there is to it. Fill the bed with your choice of soil mix and plant away. At the end of the season, simply lift the timbers off the stakes, pull up the stakes and store the whole thing in your shed until it’s time to plant again.
