OK, so you’re in suburbia. Your house is packed in like sardines with everyone else’s and your backyard is the size of a postage stamp. Also, like me, you’re mostly disinterested in hard work.

Welcome to the idea of raised bed bed gardening! For folks like us without the pleasure of a tractor and acreage, raised bed gardening is a perfect solution.

Raised bed gardening is exactly what it sounds like. You create a framework of some kind (using inexpensive materials), fill it with soil, plant. Later, you eat. Pretty simple.

Here’s what we did. My son and I headed over to Home Depot (I wanted to go to our local recycling shop but they were closed) and bought some barn board. It’s basically rough sawn pine all knotty and full of slivers. The stuff is 12″ wide and comes in lengths of 12 or 16 feet. We had it cut into two pieces of 8 feet and two pieces of 4 feet (giving us an 8X4 foot raised bed). A few screws later and I’ve got an 8X4 foot pine box in our back yard.

Next I bought a yard of triple mix soil from our local garden center to fill it. That’s part of what’s great about this technique - no turning of sod, no weeding, no worrying about the soil blend. Build the box, fill with dirt, ahem,not dirt but ’soil’. We filled the box about half full with the soil. Then we spread over the top the contents of our compost bin that we’ve been using for the past year. Nice thick black stuff, with the odd undigested egg shell and corn cob :). Gave it a bit of a mix with the shovel, then filled it all up with the rest of the soil.

It’s worth noting that by this point my son is ecstatic and enjoying this thoroughly. We’ve got all the latest Xbox 360’s, they’re gathering dust while he’s outside helping build this - no cajoling required.