raised bed question

what material is best for the sides of raised beds? I have seen tires used but there are a lot of chemicals in tires

some people use pressure treated wood but that is treated with arsnic and copper

there is the new trex materials

Are there any other choices? Favorites

Thanks Rox

Old CCA is no longer manufactured Treated acq pine does not have arsnic in it and no studies have showed leeching of harmful chemicals from pt to vegetables. Maybe someone has a different opinon but i dont think it is much to be concerned about.

I used pine untreated 2"x12" planks and treated them with boiled linseed oil/paraffin and turpentine.

roxroe.. Hi there. Saw your open question about rarised beds and thought I'd chime in with my two-cents worth for your consideration. I've been using raised beds since 1982 and haven't needed anything besides the God-given earth. In 1981 we toured China and they've used raised beds for CENTURIES---- without rubber tires, arsenic-laden wood or anything else. Seems to work fine for them & for me. My wife is Chinese & she says that is the way it's always been done in Canton. She doesn't complain about ALL the veggies I grow for us so it must be working!!! It is simple & cheap. I simply form my raised beds about 4 ft. wide by 10 to 12 feet long , and 10-12 inches high & plant to my hearts content. Between the beds are pathways about 12 - 16 inches wide. All fertilizers, compost, water, etc.. are put onto the growing beds and NOT wasted on the pathways. That's about it!! Simple, huh??? We Americans tend to complicate things unnecessarily....

GOOD luck!!
LD

Mine are spruce planks

Mine are pine but I also added some plastic to form a liner just in case . .. cottonpicker can you post a pic to give me a better idea of how that would work?

roxroe, I'm w/ cottonpicker. Though I do have the pine beds, my main garden's all raised beds -- just piled up and soft from the DONT YOU DARE STEP THERE rule. Works great for us. I love my board raised bed too, but man it was work.

Oh, so no hard sides, just mounded up soil? THAT I can do by myself. Thanks, cottonpicker.

I like to use cinder blocks. I put them two high three wide. The reason I use cinder blocks is because. The soil heats up much faster, two to three weeks sooner in the spring and father in the fall than other raised beds. The blocks hold the heat alot better than wood or other materials. You have to fill the squares up also. I like to plant things in the squares also. I also point the bed north and south so both sides of the blocks get the sun. I use those and wine barrels, alot of wine barrels. They also work good!

Richard

Richard, do you use rebars or stakes to keep your cinder blocks from moving? I haven't tried stacking them two-high. So far, I've only used the cinder block (6 inches high) bed for lettuce, greens, and such.

75154.... sorry I don't have a digital camera so can't post any pics of the raised beds for you.
LD

Quyen,
You do not need rebar for the cinder blocks. Try your tomatoes in them, they love the cinder blocks!! My beds are three blocks wide and eight and one half feet long. All vegies love the cinder blocks!! The key is the soil heats up faster and that is what the plants love. Same with the barrels.

Richard

The reason I put in beds with wood sides ( and cobbled walks between) is because I can sit on the edge or even have a wide board made to clip on for more comfort . My beds are 16 and 24 inches high. The walks are wide enough to push a 'sit on stroller' thru . This is all to accomodate the fact that my joints are ageing and I find it difficult to get up and down. And it will get worse not better so I was planning ahead when the beds were built 3 years ago.

Heres another view

Fancy, those are gorgeous beds. And paths. Do you use cold frames over them part of the year?

Thank you Zeppy. This is just the 2nd summer for planting and it is wonderful. I even have a little sitting area in a shady corner. The paths are an amusing story - I planned to use concrete sidewalk block which are 24 inches wide. The guys building really wanted to use cobblestone! I said no no more money. One day they came to me and said they had priced out the cobblestone and if I would permit them to do it they would absorb the extra cost! So of course I said yes. They were 2 young guys, fairly new landscape company and filmed the whole process because they wanted to use it in their booth display at the garden show!
So to your question; no never have used for cold frames. I have a hoop/plastic row cover set up (Lee Valley Tools) that I have not yet used and will set up early next spring to see if I can plant earlier than normal.

Here's my little sitting area.

Fancyvan --- Very lovely garden and especially your sitting area. Great picture of you and your dogs. They look as though they are contemplating a lunge into your lap?

LOL Tplant. I am eating something and they are sitting pretty in hopes of getting some of it. My dogs are pigs when it comes to food!

wow a lot of good ideas!

And fancyvan - what a beautiful garden!

I know that people use the no side method but I did that and the rain washed the soil right into the paths. My setup is much more primitive that fancy vans. I have earth mounded
raised beds with plank paths but am constantly trying to get the planks clear of dirt -so DH suggested sides -

thanks for the suggestions all.

So you don't get rain all season, roxroe, and then when you DO get it, it washes everything away. Man!

You can also use the corrugated sheeting that is used for patio covers. At my previous location I found some used material from a remodeling job, and had the sheets cut into strips 24" wide and then set them 6" into the ground, with metal stakes set in periodically along the length. I made the beds 3 feet wide and closed the ends with concrete blocks. The soil was a wonderful sandy loam, but the earthen beds I used previously were hard to maintain, crumbling after rains. The plastic sided beds were still in good shape three years later when I moved away.

thats an idea

yeah zep we are finally getting some rain and now all the dirt has rolled in the floor. I think maybe the no sides method works in areas without
wild swings in moisture and without a lot of wind. If my sister had raised beds they would blow all the top soil away!

Old railroad crossties work fine for me. . .They are heavy, and all of the potentially harmful chemicals have long since been washed out of them. . .They cost around $9-$12 each. . .

first find a railroad......hmmmm

Old logs work fine too; downed trees, etc.

I agree with cottonpicker, also. No sides are necessary. A soil with adaquate organic matter to hold moisture and mulched or cover cropped should not blow away. If your soil is little more than a dust pile, then building sides to contain it should not be your primary concern.

My garden consists entirely of raised beds 4' wide by 12 to 15' long, simple mounds of earth 4 to 10" high, mostly double-dug in an open, exposed area. The gently rounded sides can give you perhaps 10% or more extra growing space then beds with unnecessary rigid vertical sides. We've had wide swings in rainfall this year and last month had probably the highest sustained winds in the Adirondacks in recent memory and my raised beds survived fine, though some of the trellises thought a trip north was in order.

My garden site was originally surrounded by old, rotting railroad ties. I did not buy for a moment the notion that all harmful chemicals had leached out and would not be reassured except by a detailed chemical analysis. I've been removing them and all soil within about two feet. Perhaps it's overkill and an unnecessary exercise, but it is the cost of my peace of mind.

If I were to enclose the beds, I would use free slab wood from the local sawmill and replace them every couple of years as they rotted. But my experience is that no sides are necessary.

Wayne

thank wayne - we didn't have rain for three months - hence a dust pile. All the mulching in the world wasn't going to help that.

I don't use any sides for mine either. I just pile up all my good soil/compost, etc., as high as I want & in what width/lenght I want for each bed each season. It works great because I'm not forced into using the same configuration every year - can do whatever I want depending on what I want to grow & how much of everything I want to grow each season.

I'd get pretty frustrated if I had to deal with the same old wood-framed square beds every year. Sometimes I do long ovals & circles, or triangles, or whatever strikes my fancy.

Circles cool....I use kiln dried treated outdoor pine sided frames only to hold things together during the growing season. I stained them and varnished them with a bio safe paint and protective coating clear outdoor sealant by (Weathermax - Bio Safe) . I remove the frames at the end of the season and move them around the next season. I have rectangles 4 x 8 and 4 x 10 and a few right triangles 6 wide. Circles sound cool, I'll have to make some of them and maybe even terrace them maybe like a garden center piece. The kiln treated pine before making frames are 2" thick x 10" wide x 12' long prior to cutting. Two 12's make two 4x8x10 frames. I stained them "Green" close to lawn color....lol had to.

We started with all cedar 4x4 wood for our raised beds. Now we use a field stone border. We like them much better.

Benefits:
*Never decays
*Easily movable to modify bed shape as desired
*Easier on the knees (sounds crazy, but the sharp edges of the 4x4's actually are much harder on the knees than the rounded field stone
*Helps to retain heat in spring (by planting border flowers like alyssum you can take away the disadvantage of that in the heat of the summer)
*Looks more natural due to the organic shapes
*Best of all FREE for the picking in many areas of the country

Disadvantage:
Field stones are very heavy...you better eat your Wheaties before starting the project.

No sides here either. I think it boils down to the size and extent of your beds and how "cheap" one is. I'm cheap myself and I want to feel that the spaces are more than paying their way. Also I don't have tours or pictures....though they look good to me.

I have a 13x25 raised bed for potatoes and long 6x30 beds for melons and a 10x10 bed for carrots. ....my hoe will reach most of these places. The paths are ala Ed Smith style....You dig a mild drainage channel and throw that top soil into the bed area. Then you mix in your amendments [in my case lots of sand and local peat moss] with the good topsoil that was already there.

fancy - just ran across this. your raised beds are terrific

Yhanks Herbie - I like it too. Wanted to do it for years but couldnt figure out a design around my reaspberry bed(which was in a totally different spot. Once I decided to move the raspberries the whole design fell into place. I was just getting really tiredof working in dirt and mud and whatever else. And now - even if I have to 'graduate' to a wa;ler I can easily get around on the paved pathways and reach the beds easily from a sitting position

I remembered another thread like this one from a while back. Good ideas there as well.

http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/414600/

roxroe, I was just at the Museum of Frontier Culture, ostensibly to take the children for an outing (but I really go to check out the period gardening and heritage livestock). They used really simple planks, slightly braced with a couple of stakes here and there along the length of it.

someday my whole garden will look like those early American ones, with the lovely twiggy fences and everything...

http://www.frontiermuseum.org/
scroll down to the photo album; there are some photos of these beds.

i will take the stream too! where do I sign up?