The making of the garden boxes

I can't believe it's already August and I've barely blogged about my garden. To be honest, it's been my worst gardening season to date. In July, we had record breaking rainfall and August has turned into a scorcher.

I had such high hopes when we built our two garden boxes back in April.

It was relatively simple project. First we got all our supplies from Home Depot the night before.
1 4x4 (10 foot long)
12 4x2 (8 foot long)

At the HD, we got them to cut the 4x4 into 8 even pieces of 15 inches each and you get them to cut 4 of the 4x2 in half.

This leaves you with
o 8 4x4 (15 inches long)
o 8 4x2 (8 foot long)
o 8 4x2 (4 foot long)

We also picked up 1 box of 2-1/2 galvanized screws for cedar wood (not treated wood, there is a difference as I was told my the Mr.)

Supplies for 2 boxes

The cutting at HD sometimes leaves rough edges so you can choose to sand them like we did.

The first step is to lay 2 4x2 (8 feet) across resting on 1 4x4 on each end. Make sure they are flush at the edges, attach with screws (2 crews per piece, per edge). Do this again to make the other side. Once you have two sides, you add the 2 4x2 (4 feet) upright on one end and then at the other (both on the same side). Once you do this, you basically have a box with 3 sides. Then connect the remaining long side to the rest of the pieces to have a complete box that should look like this:


The extra length on the bottom of the 4x4 is to anchor the box in the ground.


Next step was to decide where to place the box. It's best to place your boxes in the sunniest spot in your yard. As you can see, your project evolved into 4 boxes.

Note to self: this spot was sunny in April, not so much in July.

I removed the majority of the weeds and turned the soil a bit. I covered the bottom with a single layer of newspaper to suppress any weeds I may have missed.


We ordered 5 cu feet of garden soil for the boxes. We ended having extra that we used for the flower garden. This was the most difficult part - hauling the soil from the front of the yard to the back of the yard. My arms were sooo sore the next day I could barely raise my arm.

The finished product in early May.