DIY Raised Garden Bed & Amateur Garden Tour

I am so excited to share my very first raised garden bed! Although I was raised in the city my whole life, my mom often did plant a simple garden of herbs, and a few vegetable plants. This is my first year actually planting vegetables and watching them grow, so I do not have much to teach on gardening yet but this year will definitely be more of an experiment!

My husband built me a beautiful wooden raised garden bed to add to the one we already had in the yard. The first garden bed was already full of herbs (parsley, dill, and chives), strawberries, mint, cabbage, and onion so we needed an additional raised bed for the other veggies we wanted to grow.

Raised Garden Bed Setup

Once my husband built the garden bed, we researched what the best way of setting it up was to keep gophers and any other critters away. Here are the layers we put in the raised garden bed.

1. Wire Mesh/Gopher Wire: to prevent rodents from digging through the garden
2. Layer of Cardboard: to prevent weeds from growing
3. Compost: horse manure, grass clippings, homemade compost from food scraps, chicken coop soil
4. Healthy Soil

My brother provided us with the wire mesh since he bought a lot in bulk off of amazon. We then layered all of our unused cardboard boxes over the wire mesh. Then, we were able to get free compost for our garden bed.

Plan Your Garden

It was so fun to plan and design what I wanted to go where in the new garden bed! The previous white garden bed was already planted with great garden essentials but was full of volunteer plants from my twin, who was the previous owner. I thought about what I wanted and where and drew it out on a sheet of paper.

Plants of Choice

My husband and I went to Lowes and they happened to have a great sale on garden veggies! I was able to grab 5 tomato plants for $10. I also wanted to get some flowers to plant for my garden so I splurged and got a peony, ranunculuses, and sweet pea bulbs/seeds. Here is all what we ended up getting!

• 5 Big Boy tomatoes
• 1 Sweet Yellow Pepper
• 1 Jalapeno Pepper
• 1 red poblano pepper
• 1 cucumber
• 1 basil
• flowers mentioned above

What is Growing in the White Garden Bed

Earlier this spring I planted some more things into the white garden bed and it is kind of starting to look like a jungle in there. I just hope it won’t get too overcrowded in there as the plants continue to grow.

• onions
• lettuce
• strawberries
• 4 tomato plants ( I have the metal trellis surrounding them for when they grow taller)
• dill
• parsley
• mint
• cilantro
• squash

Adding a Trellis

We will definitely have to add trellises to the garden bed to ensure they don’t topple over each other as they get tall. Especially for the sweet pea flowers, cucumber, and tomato plants. I am so excited to see how my first year turns out!

Other Posts on Plants

Make sure to check out our other posts on plants if this interests you!

• Carrots & Flowers Bouquet
• Resurrection Garden
• Easy Houseplants for Beginners

Conclusion

Thank you so much for following along as I learn how to garden! I am sure this will be interesting for me to look back on in a few years as both my garden and skills grow! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments down below and make sure to subscribe to get updated!