In this video, I’ll show you step-by-step how I built a raised garden bed using 100% reclaimed lumber and scrap materials I had lying around. It’s a budget-friendly, sustainable way to start growing your own vegetables—even if you’re working with limited space or resources!
You’ll learn:
✔️ How to source and prep reclaimed wood
✔️ Tools and materials needed (most are common!)
✔️ Assembly tips for a sturdy, long-lasting build
Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or just starting your DIY journey, this project is simple, rewarding, and eco-friendly.
Tools & Materials Mentioned:
Sander
Circular saw or miter saw
Drill
Screws
Fencing
Landscape fabric
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A couple days ago, I was tearing out some planter boxes around my property, and I was surprised at how much this material rotted in the last several years. So, this is cedar, and you always hear cedar should be the lumber of choice when used for ground contact or any kind of planter boxes. I was surprised at how quickly it basically disintegrated. So, I I built these about eight years ago, and some of them were completely gone, but I was able to salvage about six or eight good pieces that I thought I may as well turn into something. And I’ve been wanting to make a small planter box for either on my deck or on my patio for some some garden vegetables. And I thought, why not go ahead and use this material, see if it’s still good and and build a small planter box. And uh so that’s what we’re going to do. This lumber originated as 8ft sections, but whenever I installed it as the planter boxes, I cut it cut each piece in half. So these are all 4ft sections. And what I’m going to do is build a planter box that’s going to be 4 feet long and 2 feet wide. So, I’m not very large, but all I’m going to need is six of these 4ft sections. Or if you wanted to make this from scratch and you wanted to buy 8ft sections, you would only need three of these 8-footers. And these are 2x sixes. Again, this is this is cedar, which is the preferred lumber that you want to use for a raised planter box. I went through and gave all the pieces a light sanding. I wasn’t trying to get down completely to bare wood or anything. Just trying to knock off all the green stuff, all the dirt. and try to get it try to get the pieces as close to their original color, I guess. But, um, the wood is actually in maybe a little worse shape than I thought it was. As I was sanding, all kinds of ants and other things came scurrying out of the little holes. There’s a little spider right there. But, I think it’s still salvageable. I mean, it’s going to be outside anyway. It’s going to be something that uh is in the yard. So, there’s going to be more bugs and stuff that are going to find their way to it. But what I’m going to do now is just square off the ends of these boards and then cut them down to their final width. They’re all a little rough on the ends where they were attached before. So, I’m just going to kind of clean those up. So, I’m going to lose a little bit of material. I think the full finish dimensions are still going to be 4 feet long by 2 ft wide, but the inner dimensions are going to be just a little bit smaller than that. I squared up the ends off of all of these boards, and each of my boards ended up being 46 just about 46 and 3/4 inches long. Since it’s an odd length, I want to find the center of those boards. And a really handy calculator that I found, it’s called feet and inches calculator. And it’s really easy to use. You can just pull up the app and take your measurement 46 and 3/4. And I’m going to divide that by two equals. So it tells me that my two pieces should be 1 foot 11 and 38 in or 23 and 38 in long. So measure those out and that’s going to give me just enough space about an eighth of an inch for the saw curve and I’ll be able to get these boards cut in half equally. Okay, so I have four long pieces cut for the sides, four short pieces cut for the ends. I’m going to make two boxes that’ll stack on top of each other. So, the entire depth of the box is going to be about 11 in deep, which is ideal for growing vegetables. For the legs, I’m going to be using this leftover pressuret treated lumber that I have from another project. I think this was from my firewood bench project. This is pressuret treated pine from Home Depot that’s already been stained or it was stained before purchase. And this is not ideal to make for a garden vegetable box because that material that they use to pressure treat it could leak into the vegetables into the soil and it’s not something that you want to eat. So, we’re going to have these legs on the outside of the box. I’ll show you how I’m going to attach those in just a minute. Uh based on what the scrap that I had left available, I was able to get my legs at about 2 and 1/2 in long. And so I’m going to cut out these other two. And then I’ll have four legs. To assemble the box, I’m just taking these end pieces and lining them up with the long pieces with the end of the short piece facing out. And I’m going to cover up that joint with the leg. So it’ll look something like this. And you won’t see that that joint there. As a added reuse, recycle bonus, I’m using these 3 and 1/2 in deck screws that were used uh for the assembly of those boxes that went around the trees that I took apart where this lumber came from. So, to prevent any kind of splitting of this lumber, because some of it is very dry, I am just going to pre-drill my holes and then drive in these 3-in screws. In an effort to minimize the splintering and maybe even reduce the amount of water that is wicked up into these legs, I took my router and did a 45°ree chamfer all the way around on the part that’s going to be touching the ground. If you don’t have a router, uh you can still use sandpaper and just give like a 45°ree chamfer there. It’s just going to help with the splintering of the wood when the table is if the table’s moved around. So, now I’m going to take the legs and assemble them to the sides. I found the best looking parts of my my weathered and and very rough cedar to to I I guess show on the outside as well as um to show as the the top once everything is flipped over. So, I’m going to be building it upside down or assembling it upside down just to give it a little bit of, I guess, I don’t know, aesthetic appeal or visual interest. I’m going to use a scrap offcut and give a little spacer here and have those legs move all the way over there so that there’s a little bit of a a space here. And I might then that space is going to match the space that’s over here on the other side of the leg. And then I may even get some trim boards to go all the way around the top just to kind of frame the top out, but I haven’t decided if I’m going to do that yet. But that this will give a good this will give a nice little extra feature. It won’t be as boring as just having the legs in that spot right there. And now with all the legs attached to that first box, I’m going to pick up this second box and lay that in and do the same thing. Attaching the legs to the box. I added a piece of scrap wire fence that I had laying around to the bottom of the box just for that support. And then I added two layers of this landscape fabric for the interior here. So, that looks pretty good. It’s just about ready now for it to be loaded up with soil and other things. So, I got the the soil over here and we’ll fill that up. Now, after a few days of waiting for the weather to clear up, it was time to move the planter box into its home for the season. Not sure if it’s going to live here permanently, but on our patio seems like a good spot. It’s nice and sunny and will provide what is needed for the vegetables to grow. I started to fill the planter box with some of that soil that I had left over from those planter boxes that I took apart to make this box and has really good quality dirt because I used it for years as a compost pile and probably that’s what will go back in that spot. This soil was really high quality. It’s going to have lots of organic matter, lots of earthworms, so it’s going to give the box a really nice start. I then filled up the rest of the box almost to the top with three bags of potting mix. And this will probably settle over time. I bought four bags of this stuff, which is fairly lightweight and it’s going to be really good quality for the plants to grow, but it is very expensive. It’s like $13 a bag. Now, we’re ready to start putting some different vegetables in. I’m going to start with some seeds this season for lettuce and peppers and probably get some tomato plants to fill in the box. But hopefully this box will continue to last us for several years and provide the family with some vegetables that are homegrown. Thanks for watching. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for this build.