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How to Build a Raised Garden Bed That Will Last
I’ve built raised garden beds out of railroad ties or cedar fencing, 2x4s, bricks and even a beautiful woven lattice. But when I got serious about not having to build new raised beds every few years, I developed a simple, sturdy design that anyone can follow.
It is the only way I’ve bothered making raised beds for the last 10 years, regardless of where I was building them—the Arizona desert, rainy Pacific Northwest or suburban Georgia. This design will provide you with a financially reasonable and technically easy way to get beds together quickly for any sized space. It offers a better amount of bed depth than most plans I see, and requires very few tools. The sturdiness of the beds mean they won’t move over time, lean over, and are impervious to getting dinged up by your wheelbarrow.
Use the right wood
The most common mistake I see for raised bed building is not choosing the right wood. A lot of time is often spent on considering pressure treated (PT) wood versus untreated, or what variety of wood—cedar versus redwood. But the biggest problem is that people generally get lumber that’s too thin and/or small. Messing around with cedar pickets, which are thin and flimsy, or 2x4s, which don’t give you any vertical height, doesn’t serve you long-term. The answer is to go large: I use 2x12s or 2x10s. This means that you need fewer planks of wood stacked vertically. I don’t use pressure-treated wood, because even though the methods they use currently to treat the wood aren’t considered toxic, I go out of my way to not introduce unneeded chemicals into my edible garden.
While you can use variety you want, and hardwoods or cedar will certainly last longer, it’s not essential. Using pine or redwood, in planks of wood this beefy, will still last eight years or longer. When the wood breaks down, it benefits your garden because it’s essentially compost, and by keeping the beds inexpensive and easy to make, creating new ones in eight to 10 years won’t seem cumbersome.
Check out suppliers other than big box stores
Big box stores aren’t the only game in town for getting wood. Look specifically for lumber stores and get some prices, or—my favorite hack—hit up Craigslist for independent millers selling “rough cut” wood.
The benefit of independent millers (people with their own saw mill or setup) is that the wood is likely to be cheaper, and you might get a deal for all the cuts you need. Also, independent millers don’t cut everything down to the same length just for uniformity, like you get at Home Depot. As they’re slicing a tree into 2x12s, if the plank ends up being 15 feet long, and you only need 12, they don’t chop the last three feet off, because it’s just more work, and there’s no benefit to doing it. As a result, you get longer cuts for the same price, while supporting someone local. While I don’t see it as a downside, this wood is usually “rough cut”—it hasn’t gone through a sanding process to make the sides smooth. They also have not been kiln dried as they would be for a big box store, meaning they still hold a lot of moisture. For the purpose of building raised beds, neither of these issues is a problem. The raised beds will live outside under constant watering, and really doesn’t require the smooth sides. I actually prefer the rough cuts; I think it makes the beds less inviting to pests.
Determining the size of your beds
A raised bed is a rectangle. That rectangle can be any length you want; you are limited only by the length of wood planks you can obtain (12 or 16 feet is common). However, in terms of the width of the bed, you want to think really hard about making it any wider than four feet (but anything in the two to four foot range is fine). There’s a simple reason: You have to be able to reach everything in the middle of the bed, and anything wider than four feet makes that quite difficult. The height of the bed will always be 22 1/2” tall, because we’ll use two 2x12s stacked vertically (and 2x12s are actually only 11 ½” once dried). Consider, as you are designing the beds, if the space you are putting them in slopes dramatically, as this might mean breaking a long bed into two, so you can terrace the ground for each bed. Make sure you allow at least three feet between beds, but four feet is better. This will allow you to maneuver a wheelbarrow through the aisles, which you’ll find really helpful. Don’t be afraid to grab some landscaping flags to lay out where the beds will go and just walk around, making sure you can reach everything and it’s comfortable to walk around.
Sketch out the entire space, laying out the final dimensions of the beds. This is going to help you visualize the wood you need. For each bed, you’ll need one 2x12x16 for the shorter sides, and then two 2x12s for each of the longer sides, at whatever length you design the beds to be. Ideally, you get planks a little longer than the beds, so you can square off the ends of the planks.
Credit: Amanda Blum
Determine how much wood you’ll need
The planks you lay horizontally will need vertical supports to keep the bed together. You’ll place these in every corner, and then every four feet of length along the long side. For an eight-foot-long bed, you need one additional vertical support in the middle. For a twelve-foot bed, you need two additional supports. This support is just a 2×4 that is 20” tall (roughly the same height as the beds). Add up the lengths to determine how much vertical plank you need. For instance, on an eight-foot bed, you need six vertical supports, which is 144” or a 2x4x12’ plank. For beds that are longer than 12 feet, I like to put in some additional bracing in the middle of the bed, all the way across the width. This helps stop the bed from bowing in the middle over time. The brace is just additional 2x12s, stacked vertically, the entire width of the bed.
Credit: Amanda Blum
The tools you’ll need
The beauty of this design is that you need very few tools. You’ll benefit from a chop saw, but a circular saw will do in a pinch. Also: a power drill, wood glue, 2 ½” construction screws and a power sander, and the sander is optional. While you can get your cuts done at a big box store, you’ll save a lot of money doing it yourself, and it’s very likely you’ll make at least one mistake on the cuts you need, so having the ability to make cuts where you’re building is very helpful. The sander is used on corners to round sharp edges. This helps reduce clothing getting caught or getting scratches as you walk around the corners of the beds, but isn’t essential. Since you’ll be using construction screws, you won’t be pre-drilling anything (and construction screws come with the right drill bit in the package), but a decent power drill, even a hammer drill, is absolutely essential. While not essential, I benefited a lot from buying corner clamps so that I could get a real 90-degree corner on my beds.
The build
This is obvious, but lumber is dimensional: You’re not joining up two sheets of paper. Where two pieces of wood meet in a corner (where they join), you have to be deliberate about which piece of wood is on the “outside,” through which you’ll screw into the other piece of wood. The shorter pieces should always live on the outside, and you screw through the short side, into the longer piece of wood. Because of this, when accounting for the real length of the wood you need for those long sides, you deduct the three inches (1 ½ inches from either end) because the width of the short end of the wood makes up the difference. In an eight-foot bed, rather than the long pieces of wood being 96”, you’d make them 93”. When they butt up against the short sides of the bed, they end up being 96” total length.
Start on a flat surface, and build the first level of the bed. Join one corner, using the clamps if you have them, making sure the short length of wood is on the outside. Take the time and care to make sure the cuts are all 90 degrees, and the wood is lined up precisely. Use wood glue between the two pieces of wood. Using your drill, screw through the shorter piece of wood into the longer piece of wood. Use two screws for this, one four inches off the ground and a second about eight inches off the ground. Be sure to place the screws an inch away from the edge of the wood, and ensure you are screwing perpendicular to the wood, so it goes in straight. Continue going around the bed screwing the corners together until you have a complete rectangle. Do this a second time, so now you have two rectangles. You can usually just put the second one together on top of the first, as they should be replicas of each other.
Where to screw through wood
Credit: Amanda Blum
Credit: Amanda Blum
Next, put in your vertical supports. Place a 2×4 cut to 20” in each corner vertically. Put the longer side of the 2×4 along the longer side of the bed. Now, screw through the bed from the outside, into the vertical support, placing four screws on each side of the corner. Go around and do this in all four corners, and then every four feet along the length. The vertical support won’t be as tall as the bed—it should be a little bit shorter. This will hide the supports once you have soil in the bed, for a cleaner look.
Where to put screws
Credit: Amanda Blum
Credit: Amanda Blum
If the bed requires bracing in the middle, take another measurement of the distance between the width of the bed, and then cut two 2×12” inch pieces to that length. Put them in place with wood glue, and then screw from the outside of the bed into the ends of the 2x12s.
Now, move the bed into place. What I like about this process is that once you put the bed down, you’ll see precisely where you might need to level the ground a bit and can just do so with a shovel, with the bed in place. Lift the bed, dig it out a bit, and put it back down. You don’t need to be precise about pre-leveling the space. Fill the beds with good soil, and you’re ready to go. These beds are sturdy enough that you can tip a wheelbarrow into them and not damage the bed.
You can take a sander to the corners to smooth them out a little—a power sander makes very quick work of this. I don’t stain or seal my raised beds, because I don’t want to introduce anything that can leach into the soil. However, there are whey-based stains that are okay to use in this instance.
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You Can Rename Siri in iOS 18 (but Should You?)
It’s taken nearly 13 years, but you can finally rename Siri on your iPhone or iPad. iOS 18 will allow you to set up a custom phrase and use it to invoke Siri. Renaming Siri is possible through an accessibility feature called Vocal Shortcuts, which has been introduced with iOS 18. Before you get too excited, though,you should know that even though you can call Siri by any name, the fastest way to launch and use Siri is still by referring to it as “Siri.”
A word of caution: iOS 18 is in a pre-release stage at the time of writing. This means that you should avoid installing it on your primary iPhone. Doing this may lead to major issues with your phone such as basic apps including Phone or Messages not working as expected, network problems, or your banking apps being out of commission for months. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at Vocal Shortcuts and how it helps you rename Siri.
What is Vocal Shortcuts?
Credit: Pranay Parab
Lots of tech companies are investing in accessibility, which is a great thing. When a company thinks about and designs features for people who find it hardest to use their technology, the whole world benefits—and Vocal Shortcuts is a great example of that. Apple has designed this feature for people who find it hard to operate touchscreens, such as those who suffer from motor control challenges.
Vocal Shortcuts allows you to configure a custom phrase and map it to a number of actions within iOS 18, such as AirDrop, any of your automation routines, Control Center, and even launching Siri. If you want to see the full extent of supported actions on your iOS 18 device, go to Settings > Accessibility > Vocal Shortcuts > Add Action.
How to rename Siri on an iPhone
Credit: Pranay Parab
One of the most interesting uses of Vocal Shortcuts is renaming Siri. To do this on your iOS 18 iPhone, head over to Settings > Accessibility > Vocal Shortcuts and enable Vocal Shortcuts. Next, tap Add Action on this page and hit Continue. Use the search box up top to locate Siri and select Siri from the list of results. Your iPhone will ask you to type a custom phrase and you’re free to choose whatever you wish. Yes, it’s totally okay to choose “Alexa,” or even “OK, Google.”
Once you’ve chosen your phrase, your iPhone will ask you to speak it three times, and confirm your new name for Siri.
Why you shouldn’t rename Siri
Credit: Pranay Parab
Vocal Shortcuts works great. Whenever you speak the custom phrase you set for Siri, it’ll launch the voice assistant for you. However, there’s a catch—this method adds a significant delay in launching Siri. It takes your iPhone a second or two to understand the custom phrase and fire up Siri.
This means that you’ll find yourself waiting after speaking your custom phrase, confirming that Siri has indeed launched, and then using a voice command. This makes the process significantly slower. It’s far from ideal.
A workaround that lets you use a different Siri name
Credit: Pranay Parab
There is a hack that lets you get the best of both worlds—renaming Siri and having access to a reasonably fast voice assistant. You can set up a custom phrase for a specific Siri command. This is great for repetitive commands that you use often, such as, “Siri, turn off the lights.” You can set up a custom phrase such as: “Alexa, lights,” or simply, “Lights off.” This way, you’ll be able to use a custom name for certain Siri actions.
To do this, go to Settings > Accessibility > Vocal Shortcuts > Add Action > Siri Request. Now type the voice command that you use with Siri, such as, “Close the garage door,” or “Play some music.” After this, choose the custom phrase you wish to use to trigger the voice command. You can then speak the command three times and confirm the Vocal Shortcut. From this moment on, you can use the custom phrase and it’ll automatically make Siri execute the voice command you’ve chosen.
Feel free to add as many custom phrases as you like, but know that this exposes you to more accidental activations. When you’re having an unrelated conversation around your iPhone, it may execute commands if it hears you speak any of the custom phrases you’ve chosen. It would be wise to choose phrases that you’re unlikely to use much in regular conversation in order to avoid unhelpful scenarios such as turning off the lights when everyone’s awake.
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