Building Raised Garden Beds with Recycled Pallets

Sometimes living a "green" lifestyle can seem expensive or centered on consumerism or drudgery, but there are lots of ways to be green that will improve your fun and save you money.

Vegetable gardening is great fun, great for the environment, and great for your health. But many people find that they can't find room for a garden, or their soil is completely unsuitable for a garden. Raised beds are the perfect answer to this problem. Raised beds are perfect for keeping grass and weeds from encroaching on the garden space. Those gardeners with rocky or clay or poor soil love them because they can be filled with compost and potting soil and aged manure, and planted in immediately as opposed to having to spend years improving the soil a bit at a time. If they are built on a platform, they can be perfect for older gardeners or those with back or leg problems. They also lend themselves beautifully to the popular "square-foot gardening" method.

The one draw back to building and gardening in raised beds can be the cost. Buying new lumber to build your raised beds can represent a very large investment, and growing your own food is supposed to be saving you money, not costing you! The solution to this is to use recycled lumber. Recycling shipping pallets is a great way to get used lumber for free.

There are a number of places to find free pallets. Businesses go through tons of them, but be sure to ask if they are trash before taking any, because some places do re-use them. Craigslist is a very good way to find a permanent source for pallets that are for the taking. This is great because the business doesn't have to bother with the expense or hassle of getting rid of them, you get free materials, and they don't end up rotting in an alley or taking up space in a landfill. I found a great source for pallets at a motorcycle shop. They aren't the traditionally shaped pallets, they are what are called shipping skids and couldn't be reused, but they were perfect for my needs, and hadn't been treated or painted.

It's important not to use painted or chemically treated wood when building your raised beds, especially when growing food, because the chemicals can contain heavy metals like lead and mercury that can leach into the soil and into your food. Better safe than sorry!

To make the raised beds, tear apart the pallets, using a mallet and a pry bar. Just hit the pieces with the mallet till they are loose, and then pry them off with the pry bar. If you are lucky, the pallets will already contain a pre-constructed box shape. If this is the case, just pound some stakes in the ground, and screw the boxes to them, making sure to level it off before drilling your pilot holes. The boxes can be stacked until the raised bed is as deep as desired.

If there aren't any box shapes, this is no big deal. Just choose the pieces you want to use, and cut them to the desired dimensions. The screw them to the posts that have been pounded into the ground and straightened, making sure that each side is level. This will form a box to fill with great soil and manure for your vegetable garden.

Gardening is raised beds can be very rewarding, and is a great way to use up scraps of wood and lumber that would otherwise be going to waste. If gardening seems too expensive or unaffordable, I hope this article will show you that there are lots of opportunities to put recycling to practice in a way that will save you money.