How I planted my first raised bed garden

We built a 12' x 3' frame for the raised bed out of untreated wood we picked up at the hardware store. My husband put it together with some corner fittings and screws, and we dug up the sod on the rectangle where we wanted to put it.

Leveling the frame seemed desirable so the soil would be stable.  This was the trickiest part.  It demanded several rounds of digging deeper into the ground under the frame along one side or corner and then re-checking the level on each corner of the frame until it was even.

To break up the soil underneath the bed we used this garden tool from the hardware store.  It was pretty hard-packed earth so this was handy.

Getting one's hands in the dirt is supposed to be really healthy for you. I found it to be really fun and rewarding.  We got a variety of organic soil to fill in the raised bed.  It was more expensive than I would have expected to do this part.  By my calculations we'll need to get about 60 harvests of vegetable to make it worth the investment, but that's a lot of grocery shopping we can skip if it works out!

A friend had recommend we look into "square foot gardening" and sure enough it sounded like a pretty fool proof method of organizing a raised bed for success. After googling around a bit I mostly followed the advice here at https://gardenerspath.com/how-to/design/guide-to-square-foot-gardening/

We went to the nursery to find the plants we wanted and were able to get starts for most of the leafy greens we hand in mind:  lettuces, spinach, chard, and some broccoli and cauliflower and a few others.  

Planning out where everything would go was definitely a challenge but ones I found some handy charts online it was easier.  With square foot gardening you can use screws and string to create a grid to easily see where you are gonna be planting and more easily figure out how far apart to put the various plants from one another in their squares.

As it happens I bought just about the right number of plants for our bed.  It would have been smarter to plan out what could fit before we went plant shopping, but we got lucky. We planted onions in a thin border around the square feet we laid out with string, having read that onions will ward off unwanted insects or pests, and covered the top of the soil with some cedar wood chips to try and keep any weeding to minimum.

To keep the bugs and bunnies at bay we attempted to create a net around the raised bed using some cheap bamboo stakes and aviary netting from the hardware store.  We pinned it into the ground around the perimeter of the bed.  We can water the plants through the net of course but will have to remove the pins when it's time to weed or harvest.  

We built another raised bed once we moved from the trailer into our own home here in North Carolina.  In the background you can see a blue plastic drum we intend to use for making compost tea so as to water things with nutrients from grass clippings. 

And here's raised bed #3.  I constructed the PVC cage in order to drill holes and hook up to a hose for an auto-watering system that will double as support for shade-cloth as needed in summer, or greenhouse plastic in winter. We're getting the hang of all this and loving it!