Border for raised bed gardens

My wooden boxes are 15 years old and show little or no signs of wear.

Attach a layer of heavy plastic to the inside edges of the boxes to cover the wood. This will protect the soil from whatever kind of wood you use and protect the wood from the soil. I fold the top edge of the plastic over bender board or plastic boarder edging (4" x 25'). Then I screw the edging to the box an inch or so from the top. It gives a tight top edge on the plastic that keeps soil from getting in-between.

Dont use wood screw or lag screws to hold them together. Use brackets in the corners. Screws or nails rely on the wood for holding, and the wood gradually lets loose. Drill holes through the wood and bolt the corners together. Use nuts and bolts and washers. This clamps the wood to the bracket instead of using the wood for the support.

I have a few pictures, but the details don't show.

http://community.webshots.com/user/nogobug

thank you,

It is still a work in progress, I try to improve something each year. It started as a typical all grass back yard. When we bought the house there had been water damage in the basement. The engineer said it was due to the yard sloping toward the house and all I had to do was slope it away. Easy to say. The biggest problem was the redwood deck. I had to take it apart; hence, the boxes.

I planned the design to use all the wood and be a little more complex than just rectangles. I dug 24" deep in each box space before I assembled the boxes. (overkill) Then I bought good garden compost/soil and filled them. At first I didn't protect the wood. After all, it was redwood.

I had tried garden boxes in my first house and used long screws or lag screws in the corners. All the joints broke loose in a few years. So, with this set of boxes I used aluminum angle in all the corners. This arrangement is now 15 years old and still structural. Aluminum is overkill, angle iron would work fine and save a few bucks.

I didn't realize it at first, but gradually it dawned on me that the drainage in the boxes was poor. All the plants showed syptoms of poor drainage. So I had to dig a trench through all the boxes and run a tile out of the yard. This took 2 growing seasons to complete; could have been done in a few hours when the boxes were being built.

When I ran a drainage tile through each box I noticed Mother Nature was breaking down the redwood where it contacted the soil. The single box I lined with plastic was in perfect shape. So I raised the redwood 2x6's onto green treated landscape timbers and lined the inside edges of all the boxes with plastic.

Some of the boards warped over a few years. The boxes also bowed in the middle. When I added drainage and plastic liner, I drove 4' rebar into the soil against the outsides of the boxes and used "U" bolts to clamp the redwood to the rebar. You can see these supports in some of the photos.

the photos from the roof are facing north