Raised Bed Deck Garden

I bought a foreclosed house that needed a bunch of work. One of the things that it needed was a new water line and the only way to get it into the house was to tear up a section of the deck to get the line into the crawlspace. Another thing was that there was a neglected above ground pool with a deck around part of it that was falling into ruin.

Using wood reclaimed from the pool deck and a few new pieces of wood I made a raised bed garden on the deck attached to the house. Herbs! Tomatoes! GREEN GROWING FOOD CRAP CLOSE TO THE GRILL!

My brother and I tore out about 12 feet of deck (in icy, snowy January) to have a place for the plumbers to get their backhoe in to dig for the water line. Those boards sat in the yard for a few months and some became unusable. Actually some of them were unusable already due to rot. So when I started putting the deck back together I stopped when it became apparent I'd have to buy new wood to complete putting together a deck that really wasn't worth putting money into to save. A good cleaning and some good deck coating/paint is about as far as I'm willing to go with it. The gap left needed covering and I decided that the wood would come from the pool deck. The pool is project for next year. The whole damn thing needs moved anyway.

My son helped me take the railing off of the deck. He liked whacking the spindles off. It appealed to his innate 9 year old destructiveness. In 100 degree weather I stripped half of the pool deck off.

I started off by trimming furring strips off of old wood so I could create a slope to the outside of the deck for water drainage out of the garden. I cut down the old pool deck wood so that it would sit on top of the deck and slope down towards the outside edge of the deck. Notice I left a two to three inch gap between the boards. I did this to conserve boards and give a gap for drainage.

I attached the furring strips with a nail gun. You can use deck screws if you like. I was running low on them and went with the nail gun. Cuz . . . easy.

When using reclaimed wood be on the look out for old nails and screws in it. I don't pay much attention to them at this point because I'm using saws that need new blades anyway. Use the guards on the saws if possible and some good eye protection.

I used a remnant of a tarp that appeared in another Instructable of mine. I cut it to size and stapled it in place. I also went through with an awl and poked some drainage holes where the gaps in the wood were.

For the garden box I used new untreated 2x10s. I used untreated because so far there isn't much info on people using them for garden applications. In the old days treated wood had arsenic in it. These days it's just copper, chromium, and one fungicide or another. The new formula shouldn't find it's way into your herbs or veggies, but I'll wait until some solid research is done until using it myself. I figure I can get at least five years out of this untreated wood before replacing it.

Fold the tarp up and staple it to the 2x10s. At the end where water can drain out I let the tarp hang out of the garden under the end board. I'll probably trim it down to 1/2" or 1/4".

Fill the box with soil. Finally got a couple of tons of dirt! Much planting to do. Herbs and some lettuces and a few marigolds. Go garden!