I’ve been dreaming of a fancy garden that has a door and enough room to walk around inside a fence. I enjoy growing some of our own food, and our kids do too.
When we moved into our new house, it came with three garden beds along the stream. The wood was very rotted, but the soil was very healthy with lots of earth worms. We lived with three gardens (one being a compost dump) for a couple years. We have gone through a few garden designs over the years. We were determined for this one to be one that lasted a while.
Our requirements:
- One large garden bed
- Needed to have the same or more square footage as the old garden beds
- Needed to keep deer out
- Needed to be accessible enough that it didn’t make tending to the garden difficult
- Needed to last several years
Before I knew it, my wife had convinced me to build a luxurious garden we both wanted.
The previous year’s gardens:
These are the garden beds after I removed the rotted wood:
How did it look after rebuilding it? Read on to find out...
Demolition
Undeniably my favorite part of every project. I get all my frustration out with little regard for doing things in the right order. Taking apart the wood was pretty easy considering how old & rotten it was. You can see my collection of rotted wood past the garden bed.
Notice the wood retaining wall on the left side. We didn’t plan on it at first, but that retaining wall had to be ripped out and taken back so we had more room around the garden.
Materials
I read an article on Wirecutter about some garden blocks that make it super simple to build a garden in any shape you want as long as it was at right angles.
- Garden blocks - $2.50 each
- 2x6 wood - more expensive than I want to admit because of shortages
- Galvanized brackets for wood alignment - $.50 each
- Compost - $2/bag
- Rebar to align blocks- $2 each
That’s it! I bribed a neighbor to help me transport the materials.
The Plan
We picked an L-shape design. This let us give more room for mowing grass to the left of the picture below. The dimensions were 16’ long (vertical part of the L) x 12’ wide (bottom of the L) x 4’ for the other parts.
Assembly
These blocks made it so easy!
Moving the dirt around was the hardest part.
After pounding the 2’ long pieces of rebar through the concrete blocks, they lined up very nicely and weren’t going anywhere.
With all of the existing soil moved, it was time to find the kids and have them top it off with new compost.
You can see the metal brackets we used for aligning the long boards to keep them from bowing under the pressure of the soil.
Retaining Wall
I decided the retaining wall was a little too close to the garden for my comfort. We trimmed it back so we could build a fence and still have room to walk around the garden inside the fence. We plan on rebuilding the wall with stones.
The Fence
It took some online research to find all the right parts that we needed to build the fence.
Materials:
- 8’ T-posts
- T-post hammer
- T-post brackets
- Galvanized nails
- Pressure treated 2x6 wood (ripped in half length-wise)
- Welded wire (5’x100’)
- 4” exterior screws
- Right angle brackets (left over from another project) to keep the fence panels square
- Zip ties
- Mallet
- Galvanized staples
The T-post bracket was the one item that made it easy to mount the fence panels to the t-posts. The brackets were $2.50 each. That may seem like a lot when we could have just buried wood in concrete. The trick for us was the soil around the garden is water just a couple inches below the surface because of our stream. So we needed something that we could drive into the water-logged ground and that could be adjusted vertically. The brackets came from hooverfence.com.
T-post bracket:
We got the t-posts & welded wire from Tractor Supply. Everything else came from Home Depot & Ace Hardware.
Fence Assembly
We had a general idea of how we wanted the fence to look, but figuring out how to make that work was a challenge at first. I setup my table saw to rip the 2x6” pressure treated wood in half. Then I cut a groove in the middle of each board so the welded wire would slide in the groove.
We found that welded wire bends very easily which presented some frustration during assembly. In hindsight, it would have been easiest to make the panels the same width as the welded wire so the welds always went in the grooves. The way we did it, it didn’t always line up that way.
To make the assembly easier, we elevated the wood a couple inches off the grass, then used a mallet to pound the wood while pushing the welded wire in the groove. We used a ton of clamps to keep the welded wire & wood together while we assembled the panel. Once it was all put together, we drilled 4” screws into each corner of the panel to secure the vertical & horizontal pieces to one another. Then I used staples & stapled the wire into the groove.
Once the wire was staples in, we took two right angle brackets and mounted them on the top of the fence panel to keep everything square. The brackets were kept in place with galvanized nails.
T-post positions
We had a hard time figuring out how to position the posts without obstructing the horizontal position of the fence panels. The trick amounted to using a mason’s string and a tape measure to keep the posts equidistant to the garden. There was a lot of trial & error. Luckily our ground was soft & the posts were easy to remove.
Eight panels later, we had the whole fence up!
The Door
The door is the part I’m most proud of. This was the first time I had ever built a hinged door. It took some clever engineering to line everything up properly. I couldn’t have done it by myself though.
Woodworkers say you can never have too many clamps. We used every single clamp we own. My wife measured where the center hinge should be and helped me get everything clamped down.
We used a piece of wood as a stopper to keep animals from forcing the door in, and two blocks of wood to keep the door locked.
