Installing a metal raised garden bed

This summer I put a Best Choice metal raised garden bed in our side yard. It was a good option for our needs — and might work for you, too!

Raised garden beds have transformed vegetable growing in my lifetime. They have numerous advantages: they allow more control of soil content, they create defined borders, and they look nicer than plants strewn across the ground.

(That said, not everyone is convinced.)

A few years ago I had created very basic raised beds: ordinary 2 x 6 pine boards screwed together at the corners. If you want to get started with raised beds this is a cheap and easy way to do it. For me, though, it was time to level up.

My beds weren’t high enough to solve my main problem: rabbits. I wanted a bed that was out of their reach and didn’t need me wrestling with chicken wire fence. Internet research suggests that two feet is the minimum required height to foil the bunnies, so that’s what I sought out.

At first I intended to build my own frame out of wooden boards, but I liked the look of this Best Choice bed. And with the price of lumber these days, I wasn’t really saving much money by doing it myself. These beds come in different sizes. I picked the 8x2x2 foot size for my space. In addition to that two-foot height I wanted for the rabbits, I’ve found that two feet is about the right distance to comfortably reach across.

One word on the site of the raised bed. I wanted to plant salad ingredients: lettuce, spinach, radishes, and a few herbs. I advise putting this kind of garden as close to your door as possible. That way when someone asks at 5pm if we have a vegetable for dinner, you can pop out and grab what you need. Make things easy on yourself!

Back to the raised bed itself. It arrived in a surprisingly small, surprisingly heavy package. Inside were 24 steel panels and about 100 sets of bolts, washers, and wing nuts. 100! So assembly is simple but not easy: you just have to screw together all those panels. If you’re particular about such things, you can try to pay attention to the seams and get the overlapping parts lined up and all facing the same direction. A second pair of hands is definitely helpful here.

The metal structure is not especially robust (but remember, if it’s very strong it’s also very heavy), so it includes two metal crossbars to stabilize it. These pieces are also pretty flimsy; try not to bend them as you move the bed into place. I even considered replacing them with stronger metal, but in the end I went with what came in the box.

Before moving the bed I leveled the site using a long board and a 4-foot level. I got the ground close to level, moved the bed in position, and then kind of dug around with a spade to do the final adjustments. The bed also came with a rubber piece that goes around the top to cover the sharp metal corners.

Now that the bed was in place, I moved on to the filling phase. That part may seem obvious: just dump in the dirt! But the obvious answer here isn’t necessarily the best one. A container of soil that size is about 32 cubic feet (8x2x2). That’s an expensive load of dirt that could literally weigh a ton, so most people use a cheaper, lighter material in the bottom half of their bed.

Here the former owners of this house helped me out. They had left a lot of firewood, and I still had some gnarly old logs that I hadn’t been able to split. These were perfect to fill up the space in the bottom of the bed. I also cut up the boards from my old beds and threw those in, along with sticks that had fallen from our big maple trees. Other options are leaves and even cardboard.

I tried to position the wood strategically underneath the flimsy cross pieces so that they would have a little extra support, and I definitely tried to avoid throwing logs right on top of them.

Once I had this filler material within eight or twelve inches of the bed’s top, I added some of my own compost and then several bags of this raised bed mix. Be sure to fill the bed right up to the brim, as high as you can get it, because it will settle. My soil level has dropped an inch or two over the summer, so I’ll top it off next spring.

Finally, the fun part: growing plants!

October update: the bed has done well but I have noticed a few things. First, the fasteners have already started to corrode. Probably not a huge deal for now, but I had hoped they would hold up a little better. Second, this is a garden in a metal box, and the sun heats that box right up. Raised beds tend to need more water anyway, but I notice that this bed dries out especially quickly. So I water more frequently than I would for in-ground plants. Overall, I still love the convenient height and not having to think about rabbits.