Complete Garden Transformation & New Raised Beds!

This spring we completely redesigned our raised bed garden…and we filmed the whole thing! Click above to check out our video including a complete time-lapse from start to finish! 🙂

A few years ago I wrote this post How to Build Cedar Raised Beds From Kits (Without Tools!) on how we updated our garden with some inexpensive raised bed kits from Home Depot. Now I can safely say these did not hold up and weren’t worth the time or expense! The very thin boards of the kits started to warp and deteriorate. Gaps formed letting the nice rich soil we’d built up fall through. The kits were also 4′ wide which made it hard to reach into the middle to harvest.

So this year we decided it was time for new beds and a more practical design. We went with standard 3×6 size beds with 15″ deep cedar boards and metal brackets for the corners. These are sturdy and will easily last a decade! They also were easy to put together with a drill. The other benefit of standard size beds is in case we ever need to expand or to replace anything that breaks, we can do so seamlessly.

Another major upgrade was doing away with all the grass between our beds. The grass pathways were hard to mow and weed. For our new garden design we used a manual sod cutter that we rented from a tool shop to cut away all the grass. Then, we leveled the ground around our new beds to a 2″ depth. This made it easy for us to roll out heavy duty weed barrier between the beds and lay down some beautiful white marble gravel.

We opted for marble gravel instead of wood chips or mulch. Unlike wood, gravel doesn’t have to be replenished every year. Also, with heavier weight gravel you can use a leaf blower in fall without blowing all your gravel away!

I hope you enjoy seeing our updated garden, if you have any questions about what we’re growing this year, or the process, ask in the comments below! If you want to ask on the YouTube video instead, I’ll be doing a Garden Q&A video if I get enough questions. 🙂