DIY Stone Raised Garden Bed

After months of thinking and talking about building our own raised garden bed, Jeff finally sealed the deal when he came home from Home Depot one day with 14 different potted vegetable plants and no where to plant them.  And of course in typical Jeff fashion, building a wooden bed wasn't enough of a challenge so we went for a stone bed.  Check out our finished product!

Conveniently enough, right down the street there was some major bulldozing action going on and old houses with stone foundations were being torn down.  Huge piles of stone were just getting dumped so we decided to upcycle :-). After a week of making like a sneaky Egyptian and hauling away several trunk fulls of stone boulders, we finally had a nice assortment to get started on our raised bed.  We chose this spot in our backyard because 1) it got some of the most hours of sunlight in our backyard, and 2) it was currently just an ugly corner of dirt waiting for some ivy to creep up on it. 

Building the Bed

Step 1: Dig out a trench where you want your walls. You need at least 1/4 of your bottom stones to be submerged in the trench for stability.

Step 2: Use your largest and flattest stones for the base layer.  This will make the subsequent layers easier to stack. Try and keep each side of the wall even with each other (we used a long piece of wood and a level to accomplish this).

Step 3: Start playing Tetris with the other stones to build up one layer at a time.  This will actually take the longest time and you will find yourself obsessing over that one perfect piece that you just can't seem to find amongst all the rubble.

Step 4: Once you're happy with your Tetris skills, use mortar to seal the deal one section at a time.  We used a mixture of mortar and gravel to essentially create cement.  Jeff bought a ton of gravel from our local landscape supply shop for cheap and we got basic mortar mix from Home Depot.  Disassemble one section of Tetris at a time, slap the mortar mixture on and start stacking your next layer on top.  Mortar is not a an adhesive by itself and needs other material to make it stronger like cement, so don't fill in large gaps with just mortar.  Use small pieces of rock or gravel to wedge into large gaps in between the stones and then fill in with mortar.

Filling the Bed
Step 1: Dig out the inside of your bed. We "doubled down" and dug an extra layer deeper below our bed to loosen up the soil and clear out any roots that might compete with our veggies.
Step 2: Install a weed barrier.  We flattened out old cardboard boxes, covered the bottom of the bed, then watered down the cardboard.

Step 3: Fill your bed with a combination of top soil, kow manure and peat moss and mix thoroughly with a pitch fork/shovel.  This combination is totally up to you of course.  Every gardening expert on Google has an opinion on this.  We didn't realize how controversial the topic of peat moss is until after we bought it, so no judgey.  >_<

Step 4: Finallyyy, the fun part!!  Plan out your bed and fill it with goodies galore :-).

Here's a good website with some valuable quick tips for beginners like me:
Ten Tips for Successful Raised Bed Gardening

Hindsight is 20/20: A couple weeks later we noticed our plants weren't flourishing as expected and some of the leaves were starting to yellow.  It was evident there was not enough nutrients in the soil.  We mixed some water-activated fertilizer into the soil and saw vast improvement in only a couple days.  So note to self... don't wait until your plants are dying to fertilize!