 Hello, my name is Todd Wyman. I work for the NDSU Extension Service. I'm a horticulture agent in Cass County. And today, we're going to be talking about building raised vegetable beds. Many times, people have wanted to have fresh vegetables. In order to do that, they've had to, in the past, put in large gardens or purchase them at a farmer's market or store. With what I'm going to show you today, you can build your own small version of a raised bed and produce the vegetables that you would like to do. With the rising cost of food and with everybody being very busy with work, it's hard to have a large garden. This garden will only be four feet by four feet and will have the advantages of good soil drainage, utilizing space that is otherwise taken up by rows, less watering, savings on fertilizer, and being able to reach out two feet from all directions for any type of weeding or harvesting and not compressing your soil by standing on it. The materials that we have today are as follows. The boards I've chosen are one inch by four feet by 12 inches. The drill is your standard drill, which many of you already have. You'll need a ruler. You'll need some type of tool for holding the bolts that you're going to be placing in this. A hammer will come in handy later, a pan or a pencil, brackets. The sizes of the brackets can vary to what you'd like. Today I've chosen to use three inch brackets with quarter inch holes. The eye bolts and the nuts and washers correspond with that. We many times have to do different things to protect our gardens from different types of little rabbits and birds. I have poles that will be attached to the garden and also netting for the birds and wire to keep out the rabbits. From the tools that I have here, it's easily seen that you don't need to have a lot of carpentry skills to make one of these. I should have no problem doing it, therefore you should have even less of a problem doing it. Well we're ready to start drilling our boards. The brackets, like I had said earlier, can be of different size. One thing to keep in mind though is to have them uniformly spaced seems to do the best job of making the the bed look nice. It doesn't have to be exact, but it should be uniform. Take your ruler, measure it, the desired length. You usually want to divide it into threes. You can do this if you like just to kind of flush it up a little bit. After you've marked your holes you'll begin drilling. Once you've done this to one end of all the four boards that you have we'll get the other boards, put the brackets in and line it up and then we'll drill the holes for those boards. Now that the holes have been drilled we'll take our bracket line it up with the holes we drilled. We'll start with the eye bolt put it on the outside of your garden. I've stuck it in on the inner hole just to make sure there's enough room. Add a little washer and a nut. Snug it up and you can tighten it later. One thing to keep in mind when you apply the other bolt without the eye on it is that it needs to not interfere with the bolt above it and as far as overlapping and interfering with each other. One way around that is to add a washer or two place that through the hole and you've lured it down. You can add another washer here add your nut then when you add your other bolt you won't have the problem of it hitting each other like you had earlier it should fit nicely and if not you can still add another washer to correct for that difference. Once you have the first bracket on you can put on your next one and then we'll continue on with the other four boards on the ends that haven't been drilled line it up with this mark our holes drill it and add our bolts. Now that you have your boards ready to be attached to each other we're going to mark them and attach them and certain things you'll want to keep in mind while you're doing this. What I'm trying to do here is lining up the boards so that they're flush on this end and I'll want to do that with all the boards to keep them uniform so they're flush here and while they're flush I will go inside and mark the holes on the board. After you've done that you're ready to drill the boards. We just got done drilling and now we're going to attach the boards to each other. What I'm doing here is lifting up the one board lining it up like we had when we marked it with the pen grabbing one of my eye bolts sliding it through one of the holes here and you don't need to make them very tight now just snug them up some so that as you're doing it you have a little leeway in getting the boards holes lined up with the bracket. Next we're adding the other bolt as you can see there's plenty of room between here for me to get my bolt in there and my nut and my washer and I'm not I'm just going to slightly snug them up I'm not going to make them really tight because we do have to attach the other boards and if there's a little play in in this it'll be a lot easier to do it and when you're done you can you can snug them up fairly tight. Let's get the other boards. The boards have been attached and everything should be ready for our next step one thing to keep in mind as you notice it's not perfectly square some of the boards were a little warped and they didn't line up exactly right it's not a problem for the situation we are using this as a as a vegetable garden and if we were wanting to make it more exact we could but for what we're doing this should complete the purpose that we want. The next step is to add the string that will mark off the barrier saying that I'm going to make this into a square foot type of a garden where each foot is utilized by a plant or series of plants and for that I'm going to need string nails hammer and a ruler. My goal is to when I'm done have 16 one foot by one foot squares each side should have nails that will accommodate this. I've measured out a foot here just tap it in a little bit if you're going to do this what I would recommend is waiting for this step until you have soil ready and you're ready to place this outside and then place your soil and then do this so you can plant right away and not have to redo this step. I'm going to attach the string to one of the nails that I made I'd pound it in and weave it through on one side take a scissors cut it we were through the other side and we get a nice 16 block area in which we will plant our different plants and later. I like to wrap it once or maybe twice around the nail. Keep it snug but you don't have to pull very hard on it since we didn't pound the nails in. As you can see we have 16 areas or squares each of these areas in theory could grow a different vegetable or vegetables you like according to appropriate spacing. A good book to look at is by Mel Bartholomew called Square Foot Gardening that goes through the different processes of this method that we're going to incorporate. Our next step is to put up rabbit protection followed by bird protection. These are the eye bolts that we had placed earlier and also with support of the bracket the purpose of them is to hold our stakes that we're going to use for rabbit protection wire and also bird netting. You would not need to go oh I would say three feet into the ground like we have here you can go as deep as you want but I would say a good foot should be quite adequate to cause some stabilization. Also make sure you call before you dig in order that you don't hit any wires or other buried objects in your in your ground. Now that all the poles are in place we'll want to do is add some type of rabbit barrier and I've chosen some chicken wire which is easily available in many different hardware stores. What I'm going to do is weave oh maybe every three or four holes doesn't have to be exact every other pole starting with the first pole going around the second pole weaving and going around until I've come back to my beginning spot. So every three or four staying in line sliding into the eye bolts that we have already in place. Now that we've come to where we've started we can match it up wire together nicely cut off the remaining amount or if you don't want to do that I want to keep it all together you can just double it up and and go around until you run out and then attach it. Many times birds will grace your garden once the the fruits and vegetables are ripe and it's not a bad idea that once you start to notice that or even before get some bird netting there's several types out there take the bird netting and what I do is since you've got these here already I like to overlap it a little bit here find the end of it go out a little bit more than it is on this side and just drape it down go to your other end and overlap that as well. It doesn't have to be too tight but it does need to be tight enough so that the birds are not tempted to try to get in there drape your netting over have it wider than than you need on this side wider than you need on this side and you're set adequate sunlight rain air movement all still there but with the added protection of some wire and some netting to keep out the little creatures that could destroy your garden in no time at all well we've completed our project here as you can see it's it's something that doesn't take up a lot of space and I think you'll be very happy with with the results of it one thing to keep in mind is that we used pine wood the boards here will more than likely rot in four or five years and if that's something that you don't mind or wouldn't mind building again or even moving it to another location that's something to consider if you're looking for a more longer lasting type of a product I would go with cedar wood however the cost is considerably more we've done this inside all in one stage and our next phase will be actually implementing this with soil planting seeds planting vegetables and plants and that will be outdoors