LOL - I'm so sorry Karyn. But I'm thrilled you can modify and customize your benches for yourself. You'll have a customized gardening area for yourself! I'm almost 5' 11" - I used a standard kitchen sink cabinet in my bathroom instead of the lower bathroom vanities because I said I'm tired of stooping! (grin) The plumber complained about how high my shower heads were. He said he had to stand on a step ladder to do the plumbing because they're both so high. (grin) I said I'm not stooping any more! My house has been modified for tall people. (grin)

Hi Susan, Welcome to the forum! How high above grade and how wide are your beds? And, will you be planting one row or two? If your raised beds are four to five feet wide, you could plant either a double or single row, but I'd change the spacing depending on what varieties I was planting and whether they were determinates or indeterminates. I'd also stagger the two rows in an offset manner. If your raised beds are three feet wide, I'd plant a single row and I'd plant them three feet apart, or maybe only 30" apart if they were determinates. There again, it depends on the plants. I prefer to keep the plants a foot or so from the wood, but 6" or 8" isn't bad. The roots are going to spread out some, but mostly they will grow down into the soil. Sometimes my roots go down to the bottom of the bed and then under the boards and into the mulched pathways. Roots go where they want! Of course, I wouldn't put a tomato plant 3" or 4" from the boards if I could avoid it cause that might be crowding them a little bit. With the jalapeno peppers, 15" pots ought to be fine as long as you have a good soil mix that drains well and also keep them well watered (moist but not soggy). Good luck, Dawn

My husband just made my first raised bed three days ago using cement bricks we already had. It looks really good and though it was backbreaking work to carry the bricks, husband said it was very easy. Lacking easy access to many of the materials in the sq foot book, we used black silage plastic for the bottom and covered it first with straw seeped in horse manure then a layer of garden grit followed by four bags of compost mixed with grit. The depth is about 12 inches which should let us grow almost anything if it works. My family is very found of American veggies that take up a great deal of space and or grow vertically. So I'm working out ways to get our Three foot by Nine food bed with as many things going up as possible. I'm only 4'8" so the child sized width works perfect for me, but we made the bed longer to conserve bricks. I used old rusted steel beams for the horizontal makers and bamboo stuck under to mark the vertical squares. No link yet as we are just starting - good luck with your bed! Disaster Cat - ex-patriot Californian living in rural Ireland with husband, dogs, new garden plot and many, many cats...

Ditto for thinking it's fine as-is. I like the height, it looks like it would be a comfortable height for putting a glass on from a sitting position, but it's not so low that it looks sawn-off. ;-) I like the mixture of open and leggy with squat and heavy furniture throughout. I don't have a problem at all with a somewhat conical overall profile instead of a perfect cylinder, since for me a wider base just "feels" more stable. IMO the books on top do absolutely nothing for the functionality, but it would be easy enough to put the books on the lower shelf and have a small decorative object and an especially nice coaster ;-) on top. (I am not of the "thou shalt leave no surface without tchotchkes" school of thought, so if it were my house it would just have a beautiful coaster! Something like a wood-framed vintage - but not valuable - tile, handmade metalwork, something like that.) I hope the tray is just to show the general dimension you're considering rather than being a permanent addition, because the raised lip doesn't increase the effective diameter of the tabletop - you still can't set more down on it without the item being partially on the middle section and partially on the raised rim. I dunno about the OP but to me an armless chair of that type isn't exactly a "curl up and read a book with a cuppa" anyway. For parties when people need to sit down with plates and drinks, a little table could be set aside and replaced temporarily with larger, attractive tray tables so that a couple of people could use each one.