You can treat wood with linseed oil. It's available in home improvement and paint stores. I suggest cutting all the wood and then treating each piece on every edge before construction, so nothing gets missed. It works quite well; expect 10-ish years if you start with high quality wood.

Depending on how much you are building, composite lumber may be a better choice. As far as I can tell the stuff *never* degrades. It's expensive, though.

As for weed cover... well I find landscape fabric and mulch creates an ideal condition for weeds. The roots wrap themselves in the landscape fabric and make weeding even harder.

We've gotten 2 years so far out of low-grade pine painted with white barn paint and should get another couple summers judging by the current conditions of the beds.

Since I'm in termite heaven with extra heat and humidity to produce rot I'd expect a considerably longer life in a milder climate.

As for mulching - we used straw and crushed leaves to mulch everything in our garden and raised beds. It composts down and provides additional food to the plants. As the straw/leaves decompose, we simply re-mulch. Since we started mulching that way - I have cut my weeding in half - at least! We used plastic for awhile - but it just made a bigger mess. So the last several years - we have used all organic mulch.

As for soil - we have several large compost areas so we simply filled the beds with a mixture of garden dirt and compost. If you don't have access to your own compost - then you can usually buy a truckload of it for pretty cheap at your local nursery. Every year we put down a new layer of compost on the top of our raised beds and then mulch over everything again. If you want something lighter for the beds - then just make your own potting soil (for pennies on the dollar) - buy peat moss, perlite, and vermiculite - available from a local garden center. It is super light - great for starting seeds... but not a lot of nutrients. If you do potting mix - you need to add compost to feed the plants.

Exterior paint. Couple coats should last years. Its what i've been using. I have active termites around my yard and they have yet to touch my raised beds.

You could just used 2x8's and leave them... That thick of wood should last a good 5 years even unprotected (probably longer).

Mix linseed oil 50/50 with mineral spirit and brush or roll into every surface including the cut ends. Let cure in sun for several days.

Use a plastic or rubber liner inside the wood.

Put worms in there.

You can use canvas if you have it, or even carpet scraps. I'd use carpet scraps and save canvas for a weed barrier on top of the soil.

Why can't you dig soil from the old garden and put it in beds? I do. I screen it first to get rocks out, and mix it with fall leaves and summer grass clippings.

I've built a bunch of raised beds in a series of gardens. Rotting wood has never been a problem for me. I try to recycle old redwood decking and such for my beds, but that may be more difficult in your area.

It sounds like you are planning on making a wooden bottom? If so, don't bother, just a rectangular frame is perfect. If you have trouble with gophers or other varmints, tack some hardware cloth to the bottom of the frame. Mulch between them with whatever you have (wood chips from a tree service are great and usually free) over a layer of newspaper or cardboard.

The container forum is very helpful. Roots like to grow in the plane between water and air, so you get best growth from a chunky medium that maintains plenty of air pockets, but that also retains water. Tricky. I like shredded "groundcover" bark mixed with homemade or commercial compost and whatever soil I have available. Some clay cat litter (unused) or some of the water retaining baked clay products (Dry Stall Horse Bedding, Turface, Napa Auto Parts #8822 Oil absorbent, etc) can be added if you have the $$. I just use them for pots, but knock old potting soil out into the raised vegie beds. Vermiculite and peat pack down rapidly and provide exactly what you don't want in a raised bed. Be prepared to top it off every year.

I never seem to do well the first year, but that is probably because I never get around to installing drip irrigation the first year either.

Hi Edie,

I have varying height raised beds with 3-4 foot aisles between that have pine tree chips for mulch in between. Under the mulch is either landscape fabric that I got free, or layers of cardboard that I got at the recycling station (I love refrigerator boxes!) Cardboard is much easier to lay between beds than cloth... and more "green".

My beds are made of either 8" cinder blocks (stacked two high - sit to weed), cool recycled red decorative bricks that are approx the dimensions of cinder blocks (a Craig's list find), and landscape timbers from Home Depot. Fire ants are my biggest problem with raised beds. :(

On soaker hose - I have lots of it and love it when it works. My beds are mostly 4 feet wide and either 12 or 16 feet long. A 50 foot hose is about perfect to loop 4 times in the shorter beds. Longer runs seem destined to clog up or not get sufficient water through to the end. My best hoses were purchased at Lowes and are flat and are drip hoses with one side up, or spray hoses on the other side. I don't bury the hose, but I do cover it with mulch once plants are tall enough.

Soil is a never ending issue - I need to top it off each year. I compost, but that doesn't generate enough organic material. (My raised beds need more organic material to help hold water than regular rows due to easier/faster draining of soil in the raised beds.) I've had trucks of soil brought in from garden centers. Then add composted whatever I can find free or cheap for organics (lawn clippings, leaves, etc.)

Hope you enjoy your garden as much as I love mine!

I used cedar fence planks last year for my raised beds. Works great except there is not much support when using a shovel and need to use the wood as leverage. Will upgrade in a few years or so when the planks break or rot. The beds are two planks high which leaves a small, very small crack along the side to let breath. Not sure if this helps, buts they are there. I use my grass clippings as my weed prevention. Last year was a trying period to see if weeds would pop up because of the clipping seeds, but notta. Worked great, and worked the clipping into the soil after the growing season. good luck

Have you considered cinder blocks? I use both the wide (8 inches) and narrow type (4 inches), the latter to be found at Lowe. Those will never rot.

If space is an issue, the 4 inches wide are perfect. Jon Hughes has posted a number of pictures of vegetables growing right in the wide ones, so that space can be utilized.

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Here is a link that might be useful: Raised Beds by Jon (see all 9 short videos ;-)

I built my raised beds two years ago. I went with concrete blocks (the decorative kind). That first year, I laid out the beds and bought enough block to go all the way around each bed one time. Since my garden is on a slope, it actually ended up being enough for the front of the beds to have two rows of blocks.

Last year, the blocks were on sale for $1.09 at Lowe's, so I added the same number of blocks again, which made the beds now four blocks high in front. This translates into more than a foot deep, though the lower height worked well too.

I dug and tilled the soil under each bed before I built the edges. That way, the plant roots could go deeper than my beds were that first year. As I dug the footers and levelled out the paths, I threw that extra soil into the beds too. Then when all the beds were constructed, I got two trailer loads of manure/bedding from our local rodeo stable/showplace/Ag Center for FREE. I also emptied my considerably large compost pile into the beds, mixing it all together. I could have gone to my city landfill and gotten all the compost I wanted from there free for the loading.

Like all new enterprises, there were happy surprises and not such happy surprises.

As it turns out, horse manure is absolutely the best conditioner for heavy clay soil I have used to date. Within two or three weeks, it was hard to believe it was the same soil. It was soft and crumbly and black.

As it turns out, the sawdust bedding that was mixed into the manure tied up the nitrogen in the soil for most of the first gardening season. Just this once, Miracle Gro came to the rescue.

My season is so long, I can plant three crops in most of my beds each year. That first year, each time I pulled out a crop for replanting, I added bagged composted manure and/or leaves, compost, etc to the beds and turned it all under with a spade. By the second year, I had such fine loamy soil, it was amazing. BUT...

That beautifully well drained soil dried out extremely fast in my hot MS summers, even with a 3 inch layer of pinestraw mulch over the beds. Last year, the second year, I dug a bail of peat moss into each bed. That really seemed to help the moisture situation.

I have been contemplating soaker hoses too. The problem I see is the length of hose between the beds. I know that you can add closed tubing between the beds so that the water is not lost into the paths. This would be pretty important. I would definitely keep the hose on top of the soil. Maybe you can bring it into your beds under the sides.

My past experience with soaker hoses is that they are all too easy to damage when you are digging, hoeing, and especially when you are lifting them for storage during the winter. AND they never seem to go back down in the same way again. Oh yeah, now I remember: I hate the things, but maybe you won't.

The first year, I used overhead sprinklers. That used WAY too much water for my little beds, plus it turned my (mulched) paths to muck. The second year, I just hand watered with the hose. I rather enjoyed it, but then again, it does take alot of time. This year, I am going to try setting jugs of water with pin holes in the bottoms on the top of the soil around my plants and see if I like that way better. If you have a rain barrel, which I am also contemplating, this would be a pretty easy way to irrigate, I'm THINKING.

Lord have mercy, I don't recommend landscape fabric in any garden, and most especially not in veggie gardens. The stuff is a nightmare. First of all, the worst perennial weeds (like nut sedge, for one) will not be stopped by it. They will just puncture that stuff and come right on up through it.

Second, you have to cut holes in it to set your plants in the soil. So, next year, what if you want to rotate your crops (a good idea) and therefore need to put different spaced plants in there? Before you know it, your fabric is just full of holes (not to mention what happens when you forget it and stick a spade in it). So then, it has to be replaced. Oh brother. That stuff ways 20 tons when it is covered with mulch, and it always tears apart as you are sweating and fuming and trying to get it up.

MULCH is the best way to control weeds I have ever found. I know it doesn't work in every part of the country, but I would surely ask some questions!

You can put worms in your beds if you want to. I have done that. But I guarantee they'll find their way in whether you do or don't. If you put compost in there, they'll come with the compost. I wouldn't count on the screen keeping pill bugs out..but they ought to keep voles and moles away.
Sorry this is so long. I include a link with pictures. If you click on a picture, it gets larger.

Here is a link that might be useful: Pics of my vegetable garden

WOW, thanks for all the suggestions and pictures. Some beautiful gardens! I like the cinder block idea, but the whole reason for the raised beds is my (sometimes NOT so) Dear Husband made a hobby a couple of years ago of hitting every auction within 100 miles that advertised "lumber". So I asked him what he had planned for all that lumber. He said he'd come up with something. 2 years later, I am SO tired of looking at the pile that I came up with the "something"!! And it will put to good use a section of the yard that I call the "mud pit" that only weeds will grow in. We have an awful population of pill bugs and they infested and killed every potted plant I had last year. If screen won't keep them out, what will?! The plan I have for the beds is several long, narrow ones at least 12" high (I'm old and short so this will make weeding and harvesting and such easier.) I am planning on making a hole in one end of each to run a soaker hose through. I just haven't quite figured out the plan to hook them all together to a hose from the faucet. Does any company make "taps" that you can insert sideways into a regular hose? And the canvas or whatever I use is for between the beds. I like the used carpet idea. Maybe I can pick some up for cheap from Goodwill. I will have to see where I can find some compost. Thank you all SO much for your help. I have LOTS to think about now! Y'all are great. Happy Gardening!!

Edie

Edie, if you want used carpet, ask a carpeting company to save you some from their install jobs. That's how I got mine. I used 2 foot rips of carpet to hold down the edges of rows of black plastic and that was the first year I didn't break my back weeding. If you put it nap side down and walk on the canvas it will look relatively clean and the nap will settle into the mud and lock into place. It's great, wish I'd thought of it sooner, though it does look cheap.

Donna - 3" of mulch? Try 8-10" :) I can get free straw and spoiled hay pretty easily. (And manure. If you'll come and get it, you make stable owners very happy.)

Edie/Donna -
If one wanted a permanent soaker hose setup, you could use regular hoses in between the soaker sections.

I favor drip irrigation over soaker hoses. You can select emitters which have different rates so you can give some plants more water than others. No biggie if you damage a tube, you just replace that section; next year just rearrange the emitters if needed. It works very much like Edie's suggestion of a tap which goes sideways into a regular hose. See image link below, although that one has a sprayer, not a drip emitter.

http://calgreenscapes.com/assets/_wizardimages/dripexample.jpg

Edie -
"And it will put to good use a section of the yard that I call the "mud pit" that only weeds will grow in."

If only weeds grow in that spot because it's too wet (and not because of some other issue), you will probably be happier if you address the drainage problem first. Getting the roots up and out of the mud via raised beds will help, especially with shallow rooted plants like lettuce, but it's not going to be an ideal spot.

Actually, in my experience raised beds on top of mud pits is a desirable arrangement. Even sensitive plants, like garlic, thrive there, though I never tried asparagus. Mud pits cut down on watering, while having those muck soils ( the flora is dominated by bacteria) that many vegetables prefer. My beds have 10-12 inches of soil from compost above the bottom of the pit. When it rains hard, the paths will be under water.
It is fairly well drained though.