I like sinfonian's boxes...nice & deep. Well made too. Anyway, all new lumber is pricey these days, and weather resistant woods like cedar or redwood are the priciest. Even pressure-treated boards are something like 7 - 10 bucks for each 2x6x8ft board. And some people have issues with pressure-treated wood and vegetable gardening. Since it is Winter and you have a few months til Spring, keep your eyes peeled for people recycling wood from decks or houses or barns or whatever. In VA you're unlikely to find any redwood but you may get lucky and find some usable lumber sometimes for free or cheap. That's how I do it. It is quite interesting what people are happy to get rid of. Check craigslist or local newspaper classifieds or check out house demolitions or ask around. You can also use less weather resistant types of wood...they just won't last as long. But they will be cheaper. Or find another way to keep your soil contained...reinforce old pallets, use cinder blocks, etc. From what I know of TREX, it is easy to work with and I'm not sure it would bow more than any other wood since you're just using it to contain dirt not support the weight of dirt. But it is probably pricey. It would look pretty darn sharp though. And it would last for many many years. I built my deck with new redwood. A couple years later I found a person giving away lots of redwood from an old deck and rented a truck and took that home and used it for planter boxes and raised beds for me & my friend. That was sweet! Good luck.

Shelley, I think a lot of the raised bed/sunken bed issue in our climate comes down to what sort of soil you have. If you have very sandy soil that drains very quickly, you have to add huge amounts of compost and other organic matter that will improve the soil's ability to hold on to the moisture if you build raised beds. Since raised beds do drain more quickly and also heat up more quickly, there is a balancing act involved where you have to try to ensure that they drain well during the rainier parts of the year and yet also retain moisture well enough during the hottest parts of the year. If you have dense, clay soil (like most of the soil in which I garden), while you still have to add a lot of organic matter in order to make it drain well, you also won't have quite as much of an issue with raised beds draining ridiculously fast since clay can hold on to moisture significantly longer than the sandy soil does. Having said that, once the daytime highs are routinely going over 100 degrees, and often even over 110 degrees, none of the soil retains moisture as well as it should, and that is why heavy mulching is a must with raised beds. Otherwise, you cannot even keep the soil moist enough for the plants to grow well and produce well. Some years, even with very heavy mulch and an irrigation system, I cannot keep the plants in raised beds happy enough for them to be productive in the hottest part of the summer. I might be able to keep them happy enough that they look green, but if they are too hot they still will stall during the high heat and not produce much until cooler temperatures and heavier rainfall return in the fall. So, in that situation, you have to decide for yourself if it makes sense financially to keep irrigating a garden that cannot produce in the extreme heat. Most of my raised beds are only 4 to 6 inches above grade level, and that is because of the issues involved with taller beds heating up more. I mulch not only the raised beds quite heavily, but also the pathways that surround them. If someone who doesn't understand my mulching system were to look at my garden in the middle of the summer, they wouldn't even know that we have raised beds at all because the mulch on the pathways is so high that it makes the garden look level, and that makes it look like there aren't any raised beds at all, obviously. The difference, of course, is that the raised beds are filled with enriched clay loam soil under heavy mulch and the pathways are just really heavy mulch, so on the rare occasions that we have heavy rainfall in the summer (which likely last occurred in 2007), the excess water still drains out of the raised beds into the mulched pathways. The pathways can be like little rivers carrying excess moisture downhill and away from the beds in wet periods, but even though the paths can be too wet to walk in during that time, at least the plants in the raised beds survive the heavy rainfall and don't waterlog and die. Keeping the pathways heavily mulched is the key to keeping the soil in the raised beds from heating up too much. If I have raised beds that sit 6" above grade level, that means the boards that hold the soil in the beds are exposed to sunlight and will heat up excessively, leading the soil within those beds to heat up excessively. Unmulched soil often is 20-30 degrees hotter in my garden in the summer months that heavily mulched soil. By putting six inches of mulch in the pathways, though, the boards that surround the beds are practically buried under the mulch themselves, or only the tops of the boards are exposed to direct sunlight but the sides are not, and that helps keep the raised beds from heating up as much as they would if unmulched. If you keep heavy mulch on your raised beds and pathways, you can keep the soil easily 20 degrees cooler than adjacent unmulched soil. I check my soil temperature often (with a thermometer) to ensure I have enough mulch on the soil to keep the soil cool. That's how I learned over the years just how thick to apply the mulch to get the results I need. With crops like potatoes that are sensitive to the high heat, sometimes I pile up grass clippings and hay mulch so high in the pathways In June and early July that you cannot even see the boards that make up the raised beds. That helps keep the potato plants setting and sizing up tubers even in fairly hot temperatures and gives me a couple more weeks of growing time before the air and soil temps get so hot that the plants cease to grow and begin dying back, and that can increase the size of the potato harvest a bit. The downside to using such heavy mulch is that many pests (scorpions, snakes, sow bugs, pill bugs, pine voles, etc.) love that heavy mulch, and since my area is very rural, there are obvious risks inherent in using the heavy mulch. I always have to be very aware of snakes, for example, and this year have had several close calls with timber rattlers which come out of the heavy woods and hang out in and around the yard and garden in the hottest weather. I had so much trouble and so many close calls with timber rattlers this year (it is a miracle that I wasn't bitten on at least two occasions) that there was about a 6 week period late July through early September where I barely stepped foot in the garden at all. In an unmulched garden you can see the snakes a lot more easily than in a heavily mulched one, but with our summertime heat, it is not an option for me to leave the beds or paths unmulched. I consider raised beds a necessity for some crops, but I don't grow everything in raised beds because the exceedingly heavy rainfall that is more common in central, northeastern, eastern and southeastern OK during the growing season is much less common in my part of southcentral OK. I always try to put onions, potatoes, tomatoes and peppers in raised beds, but everything else generally does just fine in grade-level beds. About the only time that excess rainfall is an issue here in our garden is in April through June in the rainy years. My raised beds drain well enough that even in April 2009, when we had slightly under 13" of rainfall in one day, I didn't lose plants due to waterlogged roots, even though subsequent heavy rainfall for about 6 weeks meant that the garden looked more like a pond that a garden. However, they also retain moisture well enough except in the worst of the drought years so that the garden somehow hangs in there and survives July and August of most years. However, I do have to water it. Even after I stopped watering in 2011, and we were having days with the highs around 113-116 with no rain at all for 2 months, a lot of the garden plants survived after I stopped watering and clung to life just enough that when rainfall returned in late August, they were able to regrow and produce a harvest. Even the Piricicaba broccoli survived (at the shady end of the garden) and produced a harvest from October through early or mid-December of that year. Sunken beds potentially could work for some people in some areas of the state, but in order for them to work, the soil would have to drain very well. In a perfect world we'd grow everything in raised beds in spring when rainfall is heavier and in sunken beds in summer when the rainfall is scarce and the heat is so intense, but I don't know how to make a raised bed in May turn into a sunken bed in June. : ) So, I've just learned to put the plants that need good drainage in raised beds, and the rest of the plants in grade-level beds. I wouldn't attempt to garden at all here in the summer without heavy mulch and an irrigation system. I do know people here in my area who don't make any attempt at all to keep the garden green and productive in July and August. At least one of them has a policy of not watering after July 1st at all. He has a great garden from late March or early April through the beginning of July. After July 1st, he doesn't water and just continues to harvest until the combination of heat and lack of rainfall bring an end to his harvest season. That is what works for him. Because I like to have a longer harvest period, I try to keep the garden watered at least through the end of July. If no rain is falling and the heat is brutal, there generally comes a time where I stop watering the garden and just let it survive (or not) on its own. Sometimes I reach that point in mid-June if the spring rains failed to materialize in the amounts needed, but sometimes I water until at least the end of July or even early August. When I do that, the plants may shrivel and wilt and look pathetic, but often they will just barely survive and then will green up, resume growth and produce a harvest in the fall. I just play it by ear every year and adapt my garden practices to whatever weather we are having, because we never know around here if we're going to have 25" of rain (one year we only had 18.75" and it wasn't a good garden year obviously) or 45" or 50" of rain. In a lot of ways, since we have dense clay that drains slowly, the really wet years are more challenging in my garden than the average to really dry years. Bon, I'd have nothing but hugelkultur beds if it wasn't for the venomous snakes that lurk around their edges. But ,(hopefully) most of the people on this forum do not live in very rural land in the bend of the Red River with lots of Wildlife Management Land near them and, therefore, have plentiful wildlife like I have here and maybe in that case the hugelkulture beds wouldn't be so scary. I cannot even turn my compost in the snake season, which runs roughly from April through November, because of the large population of snakes, both venomous and non-venomous, that seem to love hanging out in and around the compost piles. However, I still do add lots of wood directly from the garden, often adding big chunks of half-decayed wood gathered in very cold weather (so the snakes aren't out) from our woodland. I dig the chunks of wood into the ground though, and don't leave it above ground where it would attract snakes. Another issue with any part of our garden that has wood on the surface is that the scorpions love it....so I have to be very careful to never pick up a board or log or anything in the warm season because the scorpions will be on that wood or underneath it and will sting me every time. (This makes my garden sound like it is a combat zone....and sometimes it feels that way! lol) For me, March through June is when the scorpions are the worst in the garden. By the end of June, they retreat more into the adjacent shady woodland which stays more cool and moist than the fenced-in garden areas in full-sun. One more thing, Shelley......when you read online about gardeing, you always have to consider the climate in which the writer gardens. A lot of what is written about gardening is written by people who live in areas where 90 degrees is considered an intense heat wave. Thus, some of what is written just doesn't apply to us and those recommended practices that work for them do not necessarily work as well in our climate where we sometimes have high temperatures over 100 degrees virtually every day for anywhere from 2 or 3 weeks to 2 or 3 months. Before we moved here, if someone would have told me that I'd be trying to garden in high temperatures in the 110-115 degree range some years, I probably would have stayed in Texas, where about the highest temperatures my garden ever had to endure was a rare day when the high might hit 105 or 106. When we had high temperatures in the 111-113 degree range during our very first summer here, my main reaction was 'uh oh'. I was hoping that was a rare occurrence and we wouldn't see temperatures like that very often. Unfortunately, those hot temperatures are a lot more common than I expected them to be. We just have to learn what works best in whatever kind of soil and weather we have here in any given year because the weather can swing wildly from mild to brutal some years, and we have to be able to adapt to quickly changing conditions. In April 2009, we were at the tail end of about a 16-18 month drought and had tremendous wildfires in early through mid-April, followed by incredibly heavy rainfall in late April through June, so the poor garden plants that were baking in hot, dry soil in early April that was almost totally devoid of moisture, suddenly had to endure a couple of months of completely waterlogged soil, high humidity and lots of clouds/very little sunlight. When you plant your garden here in late winter through late spring, you never know what weather challenges you'll be dealing with, so to me it is always a guessing game where I'm trying to figure out in March just what kind of summer weather to prepare for....and some years I guess it right and other years I get surprised. Gardening in Oklahoma is not for sissies (and don't we know it!!!). It can be really challenging to garden in an area where you might have 2" of rain one May and then 16" of rain the next May. You might have 60 to 90 consecutive days with high temperatures over 100 degrees one year, and no days over 100 degrees the next year. Your last killing freeze will be in February some years and in May other years. Your garden may be 20 degrees one day and 80 or 90 degrees the next day. It is the unpredictable nature of the climate here that keeps us on our toes. You never can expect the weather to do the same thing two years in a row because we rarely have that kind of consistency here, and that's part of the challenge of gardening here. I do things really differently in a year when we have 20 or 30" of rainfall than I do them in a year when we have 40 or 50" of rainfall. The problem is that a planting time, you never know what surprises the weather has up its sleeve, so you try to plant for the conditions you think are most likely to occur, and then you hope you 'guessed' right. I have some relatives who garden in an area where 85 degrees is considered a really hot day, and while they face other kinds of challenges in their gardens, they never have the issues we deal with because of our intense summer sunlight and heat. On the other hand, though, they can have trouble getting good yields from crops that demand a long, hot growing season. So, when they tell me it is very hot where they live, I kinda grin to myself because their idea of very hot weather is really different from our idea of really hot weather and, all things being equal, I'd still rather garden here than in a significantly colder climate with a significantly cooler and shorter growing season. Of course, I do think it would be lovely to have a summer where an 85 degree was about as hot as it gets, but we almost never have a summer like that here. Dorothy and I both have mentioned here several times that we remember one summer in fairly recent times where both TX and OK had a cool, wet summer and it was around 1996 or 1997....but we haven't had a nice cool summer like that since then. Dawn

There is no "right answer", it all depends on your personal preferences, your needs, and how much you want to spend. Keep in mind that in essence, a bed is any defined space holding a planting mix that differs significantly from the structure of the surrounding soil. Here are some options: Nothing at all: You don't *have* to have a side on your raised bed. Some folks just mound the soil up and use a hoe or rake to keep the edges relatively steep. This works best in places where flood action isn't likely to erode the beds with water running around them and there are not weeds or invasive grasses growing near the edge of the beds. Plus, it is really cheap, and can be lived with even in less than ideal circumstances until sides can be built later. Weedless Gardening by Lee Reich covers this approach. Sunken Beds:In keeping with the above, the raised part of building a bed is optional. Some desert locations use sunken beds to maximize water use. If you live in a hot, dry climate don't let the focus on reduced ground preparation distract from the advantages of a sunken bed. Though it is a lot of work to dig each sunken bed, screen out the caliche, and then add compost, etc. to the remaining soil, it is work that is only needed once per bed. The advantage of having a sunken bed that keeps water more easily combined with paths of undisturbed native soil can be well worth it in some climates. Untreated wood: Some people use thin strip of plywood with more solid corner stakes and simply replace their beds ever several years as the wood falls apart. Others have found that use of 2x lumber (either 2x8 or 2x12 or stacked 2x6s) lasts a very long time and is sturdy enough to bear weight even along the edges and resists mechanical injury from weed trimmers or wheelbarrows. Some staple heavy plastic to the inside of their wood sides to help keep moisture away from the boards and prolong their life. Use of a naturally decay resistant wood like cedar or redwood is both attractive and exceptionally durable, but considerably more expensive. Check the damaged wood section at lumber yards for big discounts. Landscape Timbers: They last almost forever even when in constant contact with moist ground. However, there is/was considerable debate about the CCA treated landscape timbers possibly leaching into the soil and being taken up by certain vegetables. A commonly recommended precaution is to placing a heavy-duty layer of plastic between the landscape timbers and the bed contents, which actually helps keep the wood dryer (thus lasting even longer) and prevented the preservatives from leaching directly into the soil. New wood preservatives are not supposed to be as dangerous, but using the plastic barrier method could not hurt... Plastic milk crates: Some have used plastic milk crates lined w/perforated cardboard & filled with soil as planters. They're great for growing carrots (24 to the crate). You can use them as edging for raised beds by arranging them in open rectangles that you then fill with soil. They form a sturdy, frugal & easily expanded raised bed system and container garden all in one. You can also use the wooden fruit crates that produce markets toss out. They only last a season or two (unlike the milk crates which may outlive us) but they work just as well. We do not recommend railroad ties: If there is enough creosote left in the tie to keep it preserved, there is enough to leach considerable quantities into the soil around it. The reason used RR ties can be bought cheaply is that throwing them away requires paying a hefty hazardous material fee. They are also a vector for transporting Formosan termites. If a railroad tie seems light compared to others that look fresher, most likely its middle portion has already been removed by some sort of wood destroying insect, and should not by purchased. The good ones do last forever and have a rustic look, but the plastic barrier method is not always sufficient to effectively stop creosote leaching. Masonry products: Durable, generally portable, and flexible, with a higher initial cost offset by permanency and other benefits. Existing or bought stone, cinderblocks, stacked or mortared bricks, or concrete paving materials all make a suitable bed edge. Cinderblocks can be moved or rearranged if a bed needs to be extended or relocated. For a classy permanent raised bed made from cinders or salvaged brick, it can be coated with a concrete based substance called hypertufa (See the Hypertufa forum here at GW for more information). Plastic bed edging: cheap shallow beds are a breeze to make using the generic black plastic bed edging materials. Especially useful if needing to make a raised bed around something, in tight locations, or to transition from a more formal planting into a vegetable patch tucked onto one end of a decorative garden. Rubber lumber made from old tires Fiber cement house siding boards (like Hardi-plank) or exterior fascia trim boards Plastic Mesh Corrugated tin Composite plastic/wood decking material (like Trex): it should work great-- but once you price it, you may decide to seek a cheaper option. Whatever you've got! Use your imagination and what is available-- then let us know if it works!

I have a raised bed garden that I made 14 years ago from cedar 2x12's. It is starting to rot and sag and I need to dowsize anyway, so I am replacing it. I have purchased corners from here http://www.problemsolvers.com/raised-bed-corners-set-of-four.htm?aff=5512&CAWELAID=530007760000009442&CAGPSPN=pla&gclid=CJSykraroMsCFYwfhgodlKUDIA  They are very strong and amazing! I had to purchase extra screws and got grey ones instead of silver. The wood I used is cedar 2x12's again and I am in the process of construction. The cost for two 2'x3' beds was $110 plus $28 for brackets plus $10 for screws and I still need more screws. I need to make 4 more 2'x4' beds in another part of my yard. I may use these plastic ones for that. They last for 25 years. The only problem is, is that they are white, and I really am not excited about painting them tan. :) http://www.guarden.com/guarden/index.html So there you have my garden planning adventures for the winter. I forgot to mention, I also use a garden cart to sit on so I don't have to bend. It is great fun! Rebecca