How To Build DIY Garden Boxes

In the past few years, I’ve developed a green thumb.

While in the thick of stay-at-home orders and largely being home over the past few years, we took a look at our yard and decided it was time to really make it our own. Even though I adore flowers and always have some in vases at home, I’d never really gotten into gardening before because, well, while in Chicago we didn’t have our own yard! I’ve since learned that gardening is a great family activity to do together, and is fun to maintain while also being fairly low commitment. It was the perfect hobby to take on. We’ve always loved our indoor plants, but herbs, vegetables, and flowers were a whole new realm we were excited about tackling and learning more about. Insert: DIY garden boxes to house our very first garden!

Why garden boxes?

Building a raised garden vis garden boxes was an ideal segway into our gardening adventure for a lot of reasons.

First, they help to consolidate and organize your garden. With this being our first year gardening, we wanted to start slow. Planting in boxes helped us to create organized rows of plants, which definitely makes caring for our garden easier! And did you know you can grow up to 10x the amount of produce in the same space by using raised beds?!

Second, our backyard has the tendency to have sitting water at times, especially when lots of rain falls. We liked the idea of the soil being above the ground in our boxes, helping it to drain effectively. This was probably the biggest factor in us deciding to do raised beds.

Third, we wanted to ensure weeds were removed from the equation. We knew they’d inevitably pop up in the ground soil, but are less likely to do so in a raised bed. Overall, that means less work maintaining the garden! A raised bed also means more protection from garden pests such as slugs.

And, honestly, we just love how they look! So across the board, making DIY garden boxes was the clear winner in how we approached our garden set up.

How To Build DIY Garden Boxes

The actual building of our DIY garden boxes was fairly easy and took only a few hours! (I owe ALL the credit to Doug as I merely helped in passing while taking notes along the way for this blog post. Ha!) The most time-consuming work was the preparation. Below are details on all we used to build them, as well as step-by-step instructions. We are by no means experts and we largely followed the directions of this blog post, with some modifications, so definitely swing by that resource if you’re looking for more clarification on the below.

Tools & Materials Needed

Cedar Boards, cut to size and designations of layout. (See step 2 below.)
Saw
Drill
Screws
Waterproof liner (Typically used for roofs and siding but can also be used for garden boxes!)
Cardboard

DIY Garden Box Step by Step

Step #1: Prepare the ground & space for your boxes

A big part of building DIY garden boxes is to prepare the ground that the boxes are to sit upon! We have an area behind our garage that was largely underutilized and gets a lot of direct sunlight, so we decided to put our boxes there. Plus, it’s nice that they’re out of the way from where the kids run around and play in the yard.

Here’s some food for thought as you’re considering where to place your boxes: You need a space with lots of direct sunlight, and we’ve found it very helpful to have sprinklers by our boxes! The sprinklers have definitely helped to keep our plants thriving and watered properly.

The ground of that space was a bit of a mess. It had a ton of weeds, and it really needed to be leveled. So, we spent almost an entire afternoon digging up weeds and getting that space ready. (See imagery below!) The end result was a leveled dirt ground that was ready for our boxes and surrounding mulch.

Step #2: Determine the layout and sizing of your boxes

The best layout for your garden boxes is totally personal and up to you! We played around with a few shapes including 3 individual rows, which we didn’t like the look of, so ultimately we went with a “U” shape for our boxes. We determined that largely based on visual preference and also functionality within the space.

The measurements are also something that you’ll have to determine based on your preferences. The space that our garden boxes sits in is fairly small. Our end sizes was largely a result of marrying the needs of the space with the functionality of the boards. We got 1 ft x 12 ft boards that were 10 ft long, and cut those into to 7.5 ft and 2.5 ft length boards to establish our specifications. (So, in other words, the long sides of our boxes are 7.5 ft and the short sides are 2.5 ft) Each box has found cedar boards that made up one box, because we have two boards layered to make up the height of our boxes.

Step #3: Build your boxes & place them into the final position

The actual boxes were super easy to build! Each box essentially has two 7.5 ft boards stacked on the long side, and two 2.5 ft boards stacked on the short. Those boards are screwed into 2×4 posts that are found on each corner and also in the middle of the configuration. (See photo below for reference.) That’s essentially it!

It really doesn’t matter how you configure the layout of your boxes, so long as you leverage the posts to adhere the sides to. We have found our boxes to be very sturdy and have so far held up great in terms of weather and durability!

Before we filled the boxes with soil, we lined them internally with plastic liner, and we also placed cardboard at the bottom. The plastic liner helps to protect from weathering and damage. The cardboard helps to prevent weeds and grass below the boxes, and it also acts as a compost food for worms. (Worms are great for gardens!)

Step #4: Fill DIY garden boxes with soil & finalize space surrounding boxes

Once your garden boxes are built and ready, it’s time to fill them and also the surrounding space! First, we placed all the surrounding mulch in the area. We decided to do mulch simply for ease of maintenance.

Next, we filled the boxes with our garden soil. Our boxes are about 2 ft deep, so it required quite a bit of soil, but it’s also a great depth as it allows for plenty of room for the plant’s roots. We purchased organic, composed soil from a local contact. Essentially, he dropped off a massive pile to our driveway, and we shoveled it all into the boxes! (You can see the extra dirt in the back corner of the below photo! We used the extra dirt to plant additional flowers around our yard.)

Step #5: Have fun planting!

Now, the fun part! Once your garden boxes are filled with soil, you’re ready to start planting. We decided to go with primarily annual plants, because this is our first summer having a garden and we wanted to get our feet wet before deciding on any perennial plants.

For the same reason (this being our first growing season) we decided to purchase plants already grow, as opposed to starting from seeds, for our garden boxes.

Here’s a list of the different plants we have in our garden. For herbs, we have cilantro, oregano, basil, thyme, dill, and eucalyptus. Mint was planted in individual planters because we read that those tend to take over a garden. For flowers, we planted Marigolds (great for keeping pests away!), Heat It Up Yellow, Supertunia Paradise, and Dahlias, among others. For vegetables and fruits, we planted tomatoes and a blueberry bush. We also planted a pumpkin plant and carrots, but those are found outside our garden boxes!

Our approach was to do 3 of each plant in rows. In hindsight, I think we should have done only two, and perhaps even should have done less plants overall. Months in, some of our plants are getting very overgrown (Specifically the citronella!) and they’re tough to maintain!

DIY Garden Bed Ideas

I’ve seen pretty much every configuration of layouts for garden boxes, and after playing around with a few ourselves I will say this as a key piece of advice: Play into your space! We specifically set up our boxes with a few things in mind.

First: Watering. We have a sprinkler system behind the garage that we made sure reached all our boxes. This has honestly saved our garden as there have been plenty of very hot days when I personally have forgotten to check on it and water it. If to my plants on the front porch are any indication of what would have happened sans sprinklers, the garden by now would be donezo. (My porch plants require frequent manual watering since they’re elevated!)

Second: Pruning and general maintenance. While working on the garden, we’re kneeling a lot for comfort. It’s important to have enough space to do so!

Different layouts for boxes include rows, U-shape (what we have), L-Shape, a 4-sided closed box, and more. I recommend to take painter’s tape and measure the sizing and layout before building your boxes, so you can better see how they’ll look in your space.