Building beds....raised beds.

I've had a garden wherever I lived whenever I could.  When we bought our house a couple years ago it was a forgone conclusion that I would be trying to put some kind of garden together.  I'm a food grower. No flowers for me.  Not that there's anything wrong with that at all.  My neighbor has a beautiful yard full of all sorts of flowers and flower beds.  But for me I'd rather produce something I can use. It's the utilitarian in me.  We moved into our house in the mid December in 2010, so when the snow was finally gone I started working on a couple raised beds.  I really wanted to make them cheap and from recycled stuff, but mainly cheap.  So I started by building my first raised bed out of used pallets.  It didn't turn out too bad, but it is kinda ugly.

I put a pea fence in the middle and have a nice growing area on either side.

Then while looking on the craiglist free stuff page I came across what I would be building lots of stuff with...window crating. One of the Safelite stores in town usually gets a big shipment twice a year and they have tons of this stuff.  It's also great because it's only stapled together so getting the boards apart without destroying them is pretty easy and then it's just taking the time to remove all the staples.  But you end up with a nice piece of 1 x 4 pine in varying lengths.  

There's a couple reason I built the beds so high. One was to keep my dog out of them, second it was easier on the back to weed, and third I had bought a large load of top soil and needed to put it somewhere.  But they also give me great root depth for my carrots