With Spring right around the corner, and thinking how my parents weren’t able to put out a garden last year because of a super wet Indiana Spring, I decided I would make some garden beds for them.

The hardest part was deciding on a design. There are so many free plans on garden beds I feel like I read them all. However, my favorite ones that I always came back to were the garden beds made from wood and galvanized tin.

After deciding on a design, I had to figure out what size of garden beds I wanted to build. My parents are big gardeners and they can a lot of tomatoes, sauce, and salsa. So I figured the bigger the better, as long as they can reach easily and prevent bending over as much as possible. Also, I am building these in the shop and transporting them to their house so they also have to be fairly moveable between Jonathan and I lifting them on the trailer. I decided on two 4’x8′ beds.

I drew up a sketch because I have to see everything in my own handwriting before anything happens.

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Then I made a buy list, and since I was making 2 beds, I doubled my materials. I bought all my material at Lowe’s and used treated lumber. I already have Dewalt battery tools for this build. If you don’t have some already you can get the whole kit here

I started off by cutting the frame of 2x4s. Since I bought 12-footers I cut 4 of them down to 8-foot. This gave me 2- 2x4x8 and 2- 2x4x4. Then I used the other 12-footer and cut it down to 2 foot sections for the corners and middle brace. After everything was cut, I started building the frame. Make sure you pre drill all the holes before screwing everything together. You do not want cracks or splitting wood. I used a combo of stainless steel screws and galvanized nails since we have a nail gun.

Now that the frame is built, I had to cut down the metal so that it was ;b8 foot long since I also bought this in 12′ sheets. I did the cutting with a pneumatic cut off wheel. I actually cut the 2 sheets 4 inches shorter than 8 foot so they would not hit on the ends. I did the same on the 4 foot sections. Once cut, I laid the 8 foot in the bed as straight as I could and stapled the metal to the wood. I stapled all along the top and bottom, down the middle brace, and the corners. After I had that all stapled I did the other 8 foot section and the remaining two 4 foot sections.

Once the metal was stapled together this thing was SOLID. At this point I’m wondering how Jonathan and I will be able to move it but I still wasn’t done.

The finishing touch is the 2×6 on the top of the rim. You can opt out of this because the garden beds look great without it, but I just wanted to give it a finishing touch and to have a little ledge for my parents to sit on if they choose to.

We have a compound miter saw so I was able to 45 these corner cuts to make it look really nice. I tried to overhang the 2×6 inside the bed about an inch so that there was more of an outside ledge. Once I found where I wanted it, I nailed it down and did the other ledges. I think the finished product turned out better than I thought!

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They are rock solid but we were able to load them on the trailer to surprise mom for her birthday.

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