"Woven" Raised Garden Beds With Pruned Branches

I recently got into cleaning up our yard (it's only taken us living here for 6 years) and now I want to start getting into growing some crops. We have an area that looks like it was made as a raised concrete garden bed... but I wanted more space for growing.

Retail raised garden beds can be expensive and it occurred to me I had a whole lot of branches around the place that I may be able to repurpose... so I decided to have a go at creating a "woven" raised garden bed using the branches I had lying around from my yard tidy up.

If you've got branches, you've basically got the tools you need. The length depends more or less on how tall you want your bed to be (obviously if you only have short sticks then you will be limited). Other than that if you've got some compost, that's great... otherwise you can just fill it with any soil once it's done.

Gather your materials. I find it can be easier to separate your sticks into ones that are likely best used as the main posts ie the straightest ones you have in one pile and another pile for sticks that are perhaps a little less "uniform" in shape.

You can get by with sticks with a reasonable curve in them, if you use them in the right places.

Determine the rough size of the bed you want to create and place "posts" at intervals along the sides and end, you basically want three posts minimum to an end, possibly more depending on the length of the sticks you will be using to "weave" the sides. The idea is you have your posts slightly offset. So for example if you were using three "posts" for one end... two of those "posts" will be level with each other and the third one will sit between them and slightly forward of them. The reason for this is that your "wall" sticks are going to thread between the "posts" and need to do so in an alternating fashion, this creates tension that helps hold the whole shape together.

With the "posts" in place, it's now time to start building up the "walls". The first stick will go on one side of the two end "posts" and the opposite side of the middle "post" (see poorly drawn diagram as example). The next stick would then go the opposite way around, so if the first stick went in front of the two end "posts" and behind the middle "post" the second stick will go behind the two end "posts" and in front of the middle "post". This pattern helps tension the shape and hold it all together.

Keeping adding sticks to your walls, it can help to work around the raised bed one or two layers at a time as end pieces will overlap side pieces and though you can thread them in between each other later... it's somewhat easier to place them on top of each other as you go. If you built up one side completely then you'd find it tricky to build up an intersecting side quite so easily.

It can be fiddly and sometimes pieces won't sit as well as you might like but it's ok if some pieces are loose... ultimately you just want the height and a bit of rigidity to the walls. You can also add more "posts" later if you need to... you just have to carefully thread them down through the already placed "wall" sticks.

When you are happy with how tall it is, it's time to fill it in.

Before I started adding compost to my raised bed I wanted to try some Hügelkultur (basically creating a mound by adding decaying wood debris and other compostable materials). This served two purposes, one it would help to get rid of more of the branches/trunks that I had around the place from my yard clean up. Two, it would help enrich the soil (over time) by adding nutrients to it as the wood slowly decomposed. It's not required but it does save how much soil/compost you need to add to the top.

I am now up to three of these raised beds and they have survived some wet and windy days so they seem pretty stable. I also decided to add a coating of leaves for some more compostable material on top.

So that's all there is to it... if someone like me can make these then you can too... yours will probably look nicer too because I wasn't too fussed about aesthetics, just whether it would work, then I got carried away and made more, but I'm looking forward to seeing what I can grow in them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81GndMUD2eU