After spending last season and the winter in wine barrel planters, I wanted my strawberries to have a more permanent home with the ability to spread more. I wanted the area to be large and deep, existing on top of the clay soil and not digging into it, so I decided to build a raised strawberry bed out of cedar. (Most prefab cedar garden beds around here are less than 12″ tall and use double digging into the existing soil, but I wanted to build completely on top for drainage purposes.) I headed to Home Depot for 5/4″ x 4″ 12FT planks of untreated cedar decking. (Do not get treated wood — it can leach chemicals into your fruit!) They were nice enough to cut it all up for me, leaving me with 20 6′ planks and 12 2′ pieces. I also picked up one box of wood screws with an included drill bit to assemble the whole thing.
A quick disclaimer: I am not one of those people who worries about everything being perfectly level or matching some other part of the yard. I am more about functionality than perfect design, so keep that in mind if you are looking for some sort of garden perfection here. You’ll have to level and excavate everything to make it even, and use your own saw to get all the pieces exactly the same, if that is what is important to you.
As my backyard is on a bit of an incline, I needed the cross posts to extend into the ground to prevent the whole thing from sliding. (I actually think the incline is a good thing, as it will allow the berry patch more drainage in heavy rain months, keeping the plants safe from standing water and rot.) I dug four holes at the four corners of where the bed was going, and four holes at midpoints of the side panels. The perpendicular support bars were fixed slightly below the top of the bed and then extended into the ground, into the holes, roughly 5″ down from the bottom board. The left and right panels were easy — I arranged 5 6-foot board on the ground with and attached a support bar on both sides and the middle while my 4-year-old handed me screws. Once assembled, I stood those sides up using their holes. After that point, it got a bit tricky. I found the easiest way to assemble the back and front panels was to first attach all the slats to the center support piece, and then stand them up in their center holes and attach the sides to the existing standing panels. This part does take a bit of force though, as the wood is not always square and sometimes you will find yourself bending board to make them attach. This is what the cedar bed looked like with 3 sides up:
Once I had all the sides up, pushed the hard clay soil back into the holes to keep the whole thing in place. (Who needs concrete when you have clay?) To suppress the grass underneath and add some organic matter, I put down a thick layer of rotting straw from the garden beds that I am breaking down from last year, like so:
Any mulch could work though — compost, clean leaves, a new bale of straw, etc. After the straw came the soil — rich planting soil, nice and black, from Rexius. Roughly a yard of soil was enough to fill this 6′ x 6′, 20″ deep box. I luckily had my helpers to help me smooth out every wheelbarrow load as well:
To prepare the soil for planting, I added in EB Stone Organics Tomato & Vegetable Food (4-5-3) as well as a few bags of Rexius chicken compost, and used a hard rake to work it into the first few inches of the topsoil. Here is the finished but unplanted raised cedar bed:
In the beds, I planted a few broccoli and cauliflower starts along with my strawberries, as the vegetable starts needed a place to go until the main garden bed is ready. My overwintered parsley was also tucked in here to keep it safe for another month or so, while the main bed is being broken down.
If building a huge garden bed is not your thing, don’t worry — strawberries will grow anywhere. If you have nice soil, you can grow them as groundcover in your yard. If you live in an apartment, you can grow them in a strawberry pot or Topsy Turvy hanging container. If you are limited on space in a yard, try a strawberry tower!
Other posts in this series: The Nearly-Spring 2010 Update on Strawberries
Nikole Gipps is a detail-oriented web developer, mud-loving Cornell Aggie, avid gardener, occasional iron chef, patient wife and fun mom of two. You can follow her work at That PHP Girl or see all of her feeds at NikoleGipps.com.
