Raised Garden Bed

My husband, Matt, has been wanting to build this raised garden bed for some time now.  He built a 3'x6' bed using cedar from Home Depot, screwed it together using galvanized metal/outdoor screws, and installed it in our backyard the other weekend!  It's sort of our "practice" version for our larger-scale plan to have an organic community garden at our church, Leawood Presbyterian, next year!

It's on a hill that gets the most sun in our yard, so he had to dig a trench to be able to make it level into the hill.  We also bought organic soil for our organic garden.  

He brought home two shipping palettes from work the other day for free to construct a compost bin [pictured below].  It's actually about half full right now. 

We have a small metal bin in our kitchen for all of our scraps- which has been great for less waste!  Plus you can use grass clippings, leaves, coffee grounds, and lint from your dryer!  Plus my mom has a copper compost bin to match her kitchen that she brings us when it's full.  We got ours at Bed Bath & Beyond.

There are a ton of shipping palette projects going on in home DIY blogs right now, here's a few of my favorites:   

Right now our garden is not full.  It only has cabbage and broccoli in it- since a friend from Matt's work gave them to him for free!  He just gave us some Radish and Leaf Lettuce seeds to add.  We are planning on planting tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, and herbs like cilantro and basil.  Matt really wants corn although it gets so big- not sure yet.  We might end up putting our herbs in pots if we end up having too many veggies!

We also have a rain barrel that's connected to our downspout for reusing water to hydrate plants.  It is a converted old greek container for shipping olives that he bought on ebay two years ago!  Because it collects and filters water that is run-off from our roof we didn't think it would be good to use to water our food, but we will use it to water our non-edible plants around the garden.

Here's a tutorial to build a raised garden from This Old House.  It's much more intensive than what we did, but very informative.

The only thing I might want to add to our bed is a ledge for leaning/sitting when picking veggies like this one:

Here is Matt, smiling from ear-to-ear, after a long evening of work drinking a beer!  Don't worry- that Margarita is mine; can't hold a camera and a drink at the same time!

The broccoli and cabbage have already grown so much!

[That is cut ornamental grass from our front yard fountain grass that we trimmed before it started growing back green to use as "hay" on the new plants]

A work in progress...