HylaBrook's Blog

Everyone knows the value of raising garden beds to increase productivity of vegetable gardens. And everyone knows there are many ways to build raised beds at various costs and with various aesthetic appeal. Quite frankly, I have seen beautiful tailored poured cement beds, stacked stone walls around beds, beds made of just mounded soil, and beds made from scrap lumber and stakes. All worked fine. Some would fit nicely into rural settings, some in urban. My problem was what to do in my cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood that would meet the neighbor's expectations without breaking my back or my bank account. I found the Frame-It-All concept appealing, though I was concerned about the cost of their composite engineered planks for the side boards. I figured cedar 2x6's would fit the brackets, would both look good for years and would meet my organic gardening requirements at half the cash outlay for the composite planks.

I decided to use 2x6 cedar planks 4' long. I ordered 44 of 8 footers along with some other lumber for the base of the plastic shed and had it delivered. I though Scooter could easily and quickly cut the 8' planks in half. Turns out Scooter is not that handy. He cut 12 of the planks, then insisted that I had to use them up before he would cut more. That was in November.

Two weeks ago we spent a day fitting the plastic brackets onto the planks. We got an assembly line going and banged them out pretty quickly. Then I commenced stacking the planks and laying out the beds. I found they would not fit together. That is when I discovered that the planks were different lengths from 47 3/4" to 48 1/2" long. That does not even make mathematical sense. Shouldn't it be 47 1/2" to 48 1/2"? Back to the drawing board. Scooter spent a week engineering a jig for spacing the brackets on the shorter planks. So I removed one bracket from one end of each plank and Scooter went to work on them. Sure enough, that did not work out perfectly either. Seems his jig had a little wiggle room in four places that added up to 3/16" of difference, out of the tolerances allowed by the angle brackets. I had to remove the two screws from those brackets. The cedar planks fit pretty snugly into the brackets, so I think it will hold until I can get out there and re-insert the screws. Scooter is still working on the jig for cutting the excess off of the longer boards. In retrospect, I see that it would have been better to spend $12.99 each on their composite boards which come pre-cut to 44.5" so the finished length of a plank with brackets attached is 48" from peg center to peg center. I could have done the whole project without bothering Scooter. I really don't think Scooter would feel left out.

Now, Frame-It-All shows all of their raised bed kits set up on what might well be astro-turf in a warehouse. It would be perfectly easy to set up a bed on perfectly flat, even ground. Their directions show setting up the bed with the pegs pointed up, then turn pegs over and pound them in. Than would work for the shorter "stacking joint" model. In the real world, on sloping ground, you want to use the longer "anchor joints" which pegs go 11" into the ground . These also have wide wings on the peg, so one must pound them in place and then put the planks down. What I do is set the plank where it needs to go, then use the stacking joint peg to ream a hole in the ground through the bracket, swing the plank aside, pound the anchor peg in the spot I marked, and replace the plank onto this peg. To add to the complication of this, I have soil stockpiled on my garden beds, so I have to scoop the soil out of the way to start the raised bed walls.

I have a good start now on the first bed, and have plans for another seven beds. This is going to be quite the process. And I am officially missing out on prime growing season here.

 If you are interested, I bought the anchor and stacking joints direct from Scenery Solutions, manufacturers  of Frame-It-All.  In some gardening catalogs they sell for $17 a pair and I bought them for $12 a pair.  Scenery Solutions does not charge shipping on orders of $250 or more.  http://www.frameitall.com/