Enclosed Raised Garden Beds - DIY Gardening Project

welcome back to diy with dave it's been a while since i've posted any projects and let me just say this year has been a crazy one and uh you know it's been hard to find time to get everything done i want to get done and also time itself seems to just flutter by i have a hard time sometimes in this coronavirus quarantine world of of knowing you know what day it is don't mess with me pork chop what day is this well i haven't been posting a lot of projects i've still been doing a lot of projects a lot of them around the yard here and the projects for today's video are these animal proof raised garden beds so in this video i'll show you how i built them and everything i learned along the way including some of the things that i would do differently if i were to build them again so be sure to stay tuned to the end of the video for that as well as an update on my garden and how it's been so far this [Music] year [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] now one of the first things that i did when we moved into this house about five years ago was i built these planter boxes we had some similar ones in our old house and i really love to garden it so i wanted to build something like that and these planter boxes have worked really really well we planted herbs and just come out here for some fresh basil oregano or chives or whatever we've also planted tomatoes and had some success with those over the years but i've always wanted a bigger garden the challenge that we have here where we live though is there's some woods right out back behind my house and there are tons of critters we've had everything from turkeys to chipmunks to rabbits to deer to shrews to gosh what else raccoons possums groundhogs all sorts of critters and animals that will come in and eat our garden if we were to plant one our tulips every year just get mowed down by the rabbits and the deer so i wanted to build some planter boxes that would help protect against them and also allow us to grow the kind of garden that we want to grow and so i set out to build some of these raised beds that would be critter proof and would allow us to have the garden that we want what i'm using is a called hemlock it's a soft wood it's a pine tree and evergreen tree and it is fairly weather resistant i chose this wood because it's it's oftentimes used outdoors a lot of old barns in pennsylvania are made or the siding is made from hemlock in order to make sure that these last a little bit longer i did cover them in this pure raw linseed oil this isn't boiled linseed oil this is a pure raw linseed oil and it's safe for use on garden beds you can even consume it if you wanted to uh some people do as like a dietary supplement but um i wouldn't at least not in this industrial can i stain all the boards in that linseed oil and that will hopefully make this last much longer so let's first talk about dimensions i made these boxes three feet wide and that was just so that i'd be able to reach in from one side if they're any wider than that it'd be tough i made them eight feet long and i made them about 12 inches deep so for the first two boxes that i built i ended up using pocket holes to join them together because the the boards weren't quite wide enough to make the boxes as deep as i would want them to be and so i joined all of the boards together on their edges using pocket hole screws for the third box though i thought that the design was much better i first of all used one board that was 12 inches wide which was great but then i also used these posts or support pieces that i screwed the boards into and i think that is a much better way of doing it than joining the edges in fact if i were to do it again i wouldn't even join the edges of the first ones to each other using pocket holes i'd probably just leave them and just screw them into supports that i would put around the planter box once i had the the rough outline of the boxes built i then took chicken wire and put it all along the bottom the reason for this is because i didn't want any kind of animals digging up from underneath to eat the roots or eat any of the plants that i had and so again that's one of the aspects of being critter proof once i had the chicken wire on the bottom the boxes built i placed them where they were meant to go now i didn't worry about the grass i figured that any dirt on top of it would kill it which it did and it was fine from there i filled them with dirt the next thing i did was to build the cages that would go on the top i built these also out of hemlock i just cut the pieces down to about two inch widths and then joined them together with some wood glue and pocket holes [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] after that i took chicken wire and wrapped it around the edges now one thing that i learned with the first box was that i kind of cut each section with of chicken wire and tried to add that in but by the end i just kind of wrapped it all the way around and then stapled it in as i went and then cut off the excess and that seemed to work much easier once i had the cages built and the chicken wire wrapped around it then i added these hinges so that i can open up the cages and actually get to the plants to weed or harvest or add fertilizer or whatever else i needed to do [Music] [Applause] [Music] now i also this year grew a lot of my own plants from seed which was exciting i'd never really done it not quite on the scale before and for the most part the plants really really worked out i planted a ton of tomatoes and we've already had a few harvests we've had hundreds of tomatoes so far we've made some some salsa and candied we've made some delicious spaghetti sauce about 10 or 12 jars of spaghetti sauce and canned that we used that all year we also used our own basil and our own oregano and it was great i'd say the biggest tragedy are my cucumbers and my zucchini they went really well at first uh we had some pickling cucumbers made some pickles we had some regular cucumbers we used salads zucchinis that we made all sorts of things with but we actually were devastated by bugs we had some cucumber beetles and cucumber bugs attack our plants and kill most of them we were only able to to to save one of our zucchini plants and all the other zucchinis have borers and beetles and all sorts of stuff so i think for next year we're going to take some precautions uh to prevent some of those critters from killing our plants i think we might do some covers and some other things like that that'll that'll keep them off and hopefully we'll actually be able to harvest more zucchinis and cucumbers before they all get killed but in their place i have planted a few other plants including lettuce which will be good for the fall so let's talk about what i would have done differently now i think for the most part these planters have worked really really well the challenge though is that because of the way that they're hinged the plants inside them can only get so tall and that was a big problem with my tomatoes especially because they are growing up high and i really would have liked to stake them and have them grow as high as they want and so if i were to do it differently i think instead of having for tall plants instead of having it hinge on one side i might actually make them have doors or something like that what they would open that would allow me to get to them but still keep the critters out so that might be a change i'll make even to these same planter boxes for next year which i already talked about how i would build the first two differently uh these posts that i built for the third one worked very very well and so i would have done all of them in that same way the other thing that i would have done differently is i i would have been more careful about the boards that i selected for the cage now because of the limitations i had i couldn't be super picky about it because i only had so many boards but there were a few cases where i had actually cut right through a knot and that caused a problem i actually had one board split that i had to kind of shore up with some glue and some screws to make sure it actually didn't break i also would have planted a little bit differently i would have planted my taller plants towards the back and have the shorter plants up front like lettuces and other onions things like that i did that with the tomatoes but i didn't do that with my peppers and so i have to be careful every time i open and close the cages with peppers that i don't actually break branches or other things like that so all in all how was it i think it's been great it it has actually brought me a lot of joy i feel like a gardening nerd now to be constantly reading up on how to do things better how to how to plant better how to get more yield and i love coming out every day and just checking out on checking out my plants and seeing how they're doing so it's actually done a lot for my coronavirus quarantine to have something to to look at every day and see growing and to use uh it's been it's been really really great so i hope you enjoyed this video i hope that you learned something from it i hope that your 2020 is going well uh despite the world that we see around us um and if you did like this video make sure that you give me a thumbs up make sure you subscribe to my channel check out some of my other videos i'll be posting a lot of other videos on the projects and things that i've been doing this summer so be sure to check those out and i hope you guys have a wonderful fall and we'll see in the next one you already have some

Channel: DIY with Dave

Views: 171,314

Keywords: Diy with dave, diy projects, diy ideas, diy home improvement, do it yourself, garden, raised garden bed, raised garden, keeping animals out of the garden, how to keep critters out of the garden, how to build a raised planter bed, raised planter, what wood should I use for a raised garden bed, keeping animals away, how to keep animals out of the garden, animal proof, animal proof raised garden bed, diy garden, diy raised garden bed, garden ideas, raised garden ideas

Id: AVYSiZK88nw

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020