Building Raised Beds From Pallets

well hello and welcome back to common sense homestead uh today we are going to grid out and set up our raised beds um so before we get started i just kind of wanted to show you the process that i went through here i had a bunch of pallets i had picked up um a friend of the families had asked me to come by and grab these pallets to get them off they were building a new house so we went by we picked them up what i did was i sorted them into pallets of roughly the same size and i just cut them in half measured them out cut them right down the middle and i'll show you how that works in a minute but it takes two pallets to make one raised bed um and the raised beds are roughly four and a half by four um is is the size so we're gonna do that and then we'll use we have a bunch of um wood stumps and things that came from the tree service when they gave us this mulch that was part of the deal we had to take those two so i'm gonna throw that and then um some of the mulch in the bottom of them and then fill the top portion with compost that way the bottom of it is breaking down it seems like it would hold water a little bit easier and of course it'll it'd be much cheaper to do it that way so in addition to the pallets um i took two by fours i measured them out 12 inches mainly because of the price of lumber right now normally i would like to frame the whole top out maybe that's something i'll do when the price goes down but i just drilled four holes uh two up here two down this way and when i piece them together this will be what holds the top in um and then on the inside of the boxes i bought some landscape fabric it's just the you know the little black breathable fabric you see that goes down the bottom of flower beds and such um and once we get them constructed i'll take the staple gun and i'll staple that on the inside to help hold in compost and the wood chips so again we're going to put the wood chips in with pieces with the larger pieces and then on top of that we'll get compost once we get that done then i can start spreading the rest of this mulch out and we can clean up the yard quite a bit i know the wife is super excited to get all that done so all right so i've gotten through a couple of these now and um kind of got on a bit of a roll so i thought i'd stop for just a second and kind of show you how i do it um and these i just take these screws here just stick them into the pre-drilled holes you know they won't go in far of course but just so far enough to hold them so you don't have to carry them um i did find also once you get the first corner done uh the other the rest of it just goes by super super quick so i put them on here the way that i'm going to drill them so on the cap end uh you can see how they the two in the middle and then i cap the ends of them um you put the you know the two long ways there and then you just run down the long side so we'll just stick them there and then i always like to start up here in this little top corner uh opposite the first one and just get the first two in just stick them in like so [Music] and we will hold those in right in and then just kind of go right through that wood this little um impact drill does so that's fine then we'll go down here square that up like so uh get it there we want it oh well that didn't work out well did it there we go and down all right and we'll put these two oh damn that goes right into it okay square these ends all right it'll kind of tighten itself down as you go with this tuck it in a bit because it's all the way through all it all righty so we have we got our six raised beds built uh and put in i just kind of wanted to stop for a minute just kind of show where they're at looks pretty good i'm pretty satisfied with it um i got them all lined up like i said not all of the pallets were exactly the same size so i had to sort of frame them uh just pick an edge and frame them that way so i just picked kind of the inside edge of each one put them four feet apart so i have room to move in between there and get my wheel barrel and such through so now the next stage is going to be to secure the bottoms i've just got a little belling twine i just pull it through on the corners and tighten it down and then we will staple in the landscape fabric and begin to fill them all right so as you can see at this point um we have lined all of our boxes with our landscape fabric on the inside this is just going to prevent everything from falling through the slats and up here i had thrown a few things in just so you can kind of see i have taken some of these um cut pieces of these trees that weren't ground up um kind of threw them in the bottom to eat up space and then i'm going to shovel from over here fill them up halfway and then we'll at that point we'll probably put a layer of straw over the top of that and then follow that up um with the compost but uh once that happens um i'll come back and show you i just wanted to make sure you all had a chance to see this at this point okay so we've got this box field um filled it up to right about so with the wood chips from behind it um you know we showed earlier the logs that were in there as well and now i'm just doing i don't know about an inch of straw or so in there and that's going to help with the moisture retention any weeds or anything that were on the top of that i don't think there were any in there but there may be they've been out here for about 18 months or so so there's a chance there are weed seeds and stuff in there so uh hopefully this straw is going to really help keep the weeds down and hold in the moisture so next comes the compost this is the our first bed we filled it again from the bottom up we put in the last layer of compost and soon we'll be planting it alright so this is the finished product you can see we did we ended up leaving about 48 inches between the beds that's about the room that i need to get my bigger wheelbarrow through so as i as time goes on i need to add compost to the tops and that i can bring the um the bigger wheelbarrow so it doesn't take me forever because it's middle of may our options were limited as far as what we could plant uh next year i would like to do beets and carrots because we can control the soil um it's too late in our zone to start those so what we did was we just cleaned out our greenhouse we have some peppers uh tomatoes mostly a lot of odds and in tomatoes and peppers is most of what it is we have a few melons i'm not sure how the melons are going to do in here we got cantaloupes up at the top um that'll be interesting we've never grown melons before um leslie loves cantaloupe so maybe we'll get some of those this year um we have some butternut squash a lot of flowers um this bed over here i did in bush beans um i also planted on the backside of a few of these i planted some of the golden wax beans which are my favorites my chickens have eaten my golden wax beans out of the bed by the old garden um they've stripped the leaves so i'm not so convinced that the plants are going to come back but you know would be surprised this far in my experience i've learned plants are much more resilient than i originally thought they were okay so so we do appreciate everyone watching uh this episode of common sense homestead um if you have not please remember to like and subscribe and share um you know subscribing is free it doesn't cost you anything and it really helps us out as far as the youtube algorithm is concerned allows us to um to grow as a channel that sort of thing so we appreciate your time hope you folks have a great day and we'll see you next time on common sense homestead

Channel: The Garden Hutch

Views: 48,393

Keywords:

Id: 1RBLWV40Auc

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021