Sunday, September 8, 2013

Progress on the Planting Beds

With some help from my brother in law and Kristi, we've finished two of the four (maybe three?) beds. We decided to build smaller 4x6 beds instead of the longer 4x12 beds, and so far we have been very happy with the results. Here are some pix of our progress

Those are 12-foot red douglas fir 2x12 boards from Home Depot. Actually much nicer than I would have expected. Aidan helped with the lindseed oil staining. 
Tommy with the boards after the staining was done.

We let the board sit out in the sun for a few days to soak up the staining oil before building the planting beds.
Mike and I built the first box and dug out the ground to make it level. We discovered why they call out town Rockville in the process... 
Kristi and I built the second bed together today. So far they are looking great!
For each of these 4x6 beds we needed:

  1. 40' of 2x12 boards. We used red douglas fir and stained it with lindseed oil before cutting and assembling the beds.
  2. eight 90º Decking Brackets. 
  3. two 2x4's (8 foot), which are cut in half and used as corner posts. The ends of the posts are cut at a 45º angle to a point and hammered into the ground with a mallet. Then, with the lower box in place, a level the box and drive a decking screw through the corner bracket into the post to keep it level. Also, the posts could be cut to be flush with the edge of the bed, but we're keeping them tall for now since they could be used for building a cold frame, bug netting in the spring, or as a support for a trellis for climbing plants. 
  4. 3" Decking screws
  5. Lots of elbow grease to dig out the ground (there were tons on rocks the size of fists!)
Once filled with soil (soon) these beds should last 5 - 7 years. Using the decking brackets also will make it easy to replace any boards that might rot out before then.