A few years ago I discovered the joy of gardening. Each year I have added to my garden. I started out with just a few planter boxes hanging off the rails of my deck. I now have two 4x12 raised garden beds and I would like to add a few more.

I came across a neat way to build raised garden beds on the cheap by using tree branches or logs to form the walls of the raised bed. Yeah, it’s not quite as clean looking as cedar but with Home Depot and Lowe’s being totally cleaned out of cedar garden box kits I’ve had to be creative. Those kits are also fairly expensive and the quality isn’t that great.

Which one of these would you build? I’m leaning towards the one in the first pic or possibly the second.

I'd go with the bigger logs. The logs that are driven into the ground will rot within 2 -3 years, and it will be a pain to cleanup as they fall over.

The woven trigs looks cool, like Salemtown, but in order to get those trigs to bend the way you want them, they will still need to be green, and you will need a bunch of them.

The log one will be easy, long lasting and the bark will breakdown, and the worms will be drawn to it (however slugs will be as well). As the low breaks down it will continue to hold water on the soil side, and will dry on the outside.

Let me know if you want some iris's.

Aesthetically, I really like the first one

The third one looks too "Gilligan's Island" and 280's comments seem spot on.

I used to have a huge garden on a slope and terraced it using pressure treated fence posts that were flat on two sides so they stacked well, kept in place by drilling holes and driving rebar through, and lined the sides with visqueen (too keep whatever was in the ties as a preservative from tainting the soil).

Lasted years, at least 5 IIRC.

JB

coffeeaddict built these raised beds out of scrap lumber and deck screws we had around the farm.



If you have narrowed your options down to the ones in your original post I would go with the logs for the reasons 280nosler stated.

I like the 2nd one, the logs.

I think live edge cedar would be very nice looking.

I went the easy route with 2x10's. Of those 3, I would go with the large logs. They will take a long time to decompose and are a great natural barrier. The other two wouldn't last many years.