This fall, Ian came home with a stack of pallets from work, with the idea that we’d turn them into raised beds. Ian has been working lots on making sure we have plenty of wood to heat to heat the house, so I decided to take this project off from his list and make it happen while the weather is nice. Despite the fact that it’s just after Christmas here, the high temperatures for the days this week have been in the 60’s, so I’m taking full advantage.
The pallets start off like the picture above. First I use a hammer to stick the pry bar between the supporting wood pieces, then I pry them up. Honestly, this is the worst part.
This job is one of those jobs that’s hard to do with little helpers, so mostly Logan “helped” me while I was working on the next step, which was to remove the nails from the board I’d use to make the beds.
After separating the boards I took the nails out with a pry bar and hammer.
After that Ian took the saw and took a bit off the ends of the boards, to make it easier to make the boxes square.
For the large bed we’re putting most of our pumpkins and melons in, We assembled it on site because it was much bigger than the rest of the beds.
The other beds got assembled in the shop with long screws and Ian’s impact, them dragged them to the garden and started our usual setup process for new beds.
We’re going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen of these 3.5’ x 3.5’ beds, not counting the strawberry beds we made earlier this fall.
This year is all about utility and volume in the garden, we’re not going to be investing a lot of money into the beds because we’re putting a lot of money into the meat birds. We have the materials on hand to build these beds easily and we’re excited to be growing as much of this year’s produce as possible in the garden in these handy babies.
