Midmorning With Aundrea - June 29, 2020 (Part 2) [ENCORE PRESENTATION]

(Part 2 of 2.

Originally aired June 5, 2020) In today's "Gardening With Eric Lampkin", we learn how to make raised beds for your garden.

Reopen ahead oyo you've been watching our "gardening wit eric" segment here on mid morning.

And quite a few people want to know how to build those raised beds.

Here's our resident garden expert eric lampkin with a step by step guide.

Er eric lampkin: all right.

I know what you're thinking.

We're not in the garden.

Not yet.

Sometimes these projects start in the garage first.

A while back, we were looking at container and raised bed gardening, and i was showing you how mine are built.

And i realized not everybody has a bunch of 41 inch precut boards laying around.

And you might want to get started on this and kind of do it on the cheap.

And believe me, i'm all about doing it on the cheap.

I've found a little cheap shortcut, a hack, if you will, on how to do these things and save yourself a little bit of money.

Eric lampkin: we're going to build basically a six by three raised bed.

The lumber for this is going to cost you a battle 11 bucks.

And this is how we're going to do it.

All right, what will i have here is a fence post, a fence picket, not actually a post, but a picket, dog ear fence picket.

These things are about a buck 68 a piece at your local big box home improvement store.

What that boils down to is about... i'm looking at my notes, yes... 28 cents a linear foot.

You're going to need about 36 linear feet for this project.

This is going to cost you about 28 cents per linear foot.

Now you could get a 1 x 6, a true 1 x 6 pressure treated, and that's going to run you about 78 cents per linear foot.

Eric lampkin: so you see the difference is huge between the two.

And this is a little bit thinner.

It's about 5/8 of an inch instead of a solid one inch.

But for what we're doing, that's not a problem.

Now there is a little bit of cutting involved and you won't get a true six foot by three foot.

It will be, we'll call it a nominal six foot by three foot.

It'll end up being 71 inches by, say 35-1/2 inches.

Not a big deal.

Eric lampkin: let's show you how it's done.

Okay, so we've got the wood cut now and all we got to do now is basically screw this thing together.

I will say this.

I went cheap on the wood.

I bought the fence pickets, but the screws are going to cost almost as much as the wood on this particular project.

And that's because i like one step.

This is easy.

These are self=drilling screws.

You can get them at your local hardware store, local big box home improvement store.

They are two inch long and they use a little special bit, which also comes with the screws.

So that helps out, too.

And i like them because i don't have to drill.

I'm not the kind of guy that keeps the screws in my teeth.

And this is just one way to do this.

If you have a nail gun, this thing will go together in minutes, in short minutes.

All right.

Eric lampkin: well, we're finally out in the garden and i've got the bed laid out here.

I put some weed barrier down.

I didn't put it down quite wide enough.

I'm going to have to tweak that later, but this is the easy part.

And if you see i've got the bed laid out.

I've got these a 2 x 4 pieces here.

They're going in the corner.

We're going to use those to put on the second level of this when we come back here in just a few minutes.

Now there is a little bit of cutting that needs to be done here, but it's pretty easy.

Basically, you'll have to do no more than two cuts per board.

And that's only for the short pieces.

Eric lampkin: now, the first thing you'll need to do is take the top, the dog ear, off of the fence picket.

And basically, you got a line already there, but i'm going to go ahead with my speed square and pencil.

Draw a little line.

That'll be the first cut.

Now i use a miter saw to do a straight line.

You can do this with a circular saw.

I just can't cut a very good straight line.

So my wife got me a miter saw.

Eric lampkin: that's your first cut.

That's easy.

Now we're doing the little side pieces here.

So i've got to make a little measurement.

You only have to do this for the end pieces, the second cut.

You don't have to do this for the long pieces on the sides.

This is just that 35-1/2 inch cut.

Boom, there we go.

Eric lampkin: okay.

I showed you the easy way to build this planter.

Now i'm going to show you the real easy way, and actually i'm using two different methods here.

You can pick one or you can do both, but now that we've cut the boards in the shop, we're going to put them up here.

We've got the 2 x 4s in place around our original bed and just screw these things in place.

Eric lampkin: and there you go.

One raised bed, two methods to get there.

Do it on the cheap.

Not sure what's going in here just yet.

It may wait until fall, but it's ready to go.

And remember, if i can do this, you can do this.

We'll be