Raised Bed Garden Boxes From Pallet Wood

It’s finally spring and what better way to ring in this time of year than with a garden. My husband has been tending to his little seedlings over the past several weeks and they are finally ready to be transferred outside.

My sister gave him this seed starter kit at Christmas and he has been itching to plant these babies ever since. He loves it because the seeds are all 100% heirloom, non-GMO and non-hybrid. Your garden can’t get anymore organic than that.

A while back my hubby scored a ton of pallets from his job. For a few months they sat in our garage just begging to be recycled into something amazing. Since we finally have a backyard we decided to try out gardening this year. We instantly knew that these pallets would work great as raised beds. We spent some time breaking each of them down into boards and waited until the weather warmed up to start working on building them.

First we measured the boards and decided on a length for our beds. The pieces that we’re working with are basically 1x7s cut to four feet in length and 2x4s cut to seven inches in length. So our boxes are roughly four feet by four feet by seven inches.

Then we cut all of our boards to the desired lengths.

Here’s our stack of wood once everything was cut. We made four boxes total (and we still have a ton of pallet wood left).

Since these boards are made of pine we needed to treat them so they would survive being out in the elements. You don’t want to use a regular stain or paint because the chemicals can leach into your soil and toxic soil is definitely not what you wanna be growing your veggies in. After some research, the husband came across a natural wood treatment called Eco Wood Treatment. It’s non-toxic and VOC free. Good stuff! Home Depot sells it but you can also find it on Amazon.

The treatment instructions say that it can stain concrete, brick, siding, etc. so we decided to play it safe and stain our wood in the grass. We laid out some 2x4s to keep the boards off the ground while they were drying.

You just mix the powdered contents into water and stir. Pretty easy. The ratio is one box of treatment to one gallon of water (we ended up using two boxes and two gallons of water). We used an icing bucket that we scored from the Kroger bakery department for free. Be sure to stir your treatment periodically to keep it from settling at the bottom of the water.

To apply the stain you can spray it on, roll it on with a roller, brush it on or submerge your pieces into a filled container. We decided to submerge the ends and then roll on the rest.

Some friends of ours even decided to help.

After the pieces were treated we let them dry overnight. You can handle them while they are wet but by that point it was getting late and the mosquitos were starting to bite!

Here they are all stained and dried. I love the patina that the treatment gave them. All nice and weathered.

Time to assemble the boxes. Pre-drilling the holes was important since the boards were already pretty beat up and we didn’t want them to split.

To join the boards, we laid out two 2x4s and then positioned a 1×7 over them until everything lined up on the ends. Then we fastened them with wood screws.

Here’s what two of the sides looked like after assembly.

Then we lined up the other two sides and attached them until they formed a box.

And you’re done! It was a relatively easy job. Something you could definitely achieve over a weekend. What do ya think?

 Tips from the Mr.-

• When sourcing pallets for this project, make sure yours are stamped “HT” which means “heat treated”. Otherwise they may have been chemically treated to help preserve the wood.
• Wear gloves! I can’t even count how many splinters I got during this project.
• Try to find pallets that have only been used once. If not, they could have been used to transport chemicals. Ours were one-time-use and they came from my husband’s job, which is in food distribution.

Anyone else planting their gardens right now? Let me know in the comments what you’re planting. I’d love to hear from ya!