Raised Beds

In approximately 2007, Growing Hope and some local community members sought to answer the question of how people in the community could get growing in the most affordable way.  We recognized that getting starting was a large barrier to people growing their own food-- and that gardening felt like a massive undertaking to people who hadn't done it before.  Raised beds offer many benefits, including that they are a defined, "doable" space that, if taken one at a time, don't feel as overwhelming.  They also offer many other benefits including water retention, control over your soil/compost, and earlier warming.  So, we set off to discover the simplest, most affordable way to construct a raised bed using easily-accessible materials.

Our result?  Four by four foot raised beds (8" or 14" tall) made out of whitewood (untreated pine or similar wood) available at any lumber yard or hardware store.  Or, if someone could access scrap 2x4s, two on top of each other would offer the same effect.  We felt that while cedar is often touted-- and is beautiful-- as the non-treated lumber of choice, its cost make it inaccessible to many, and it may well split (that had been our experience) at about the time that a whitewood might begin to rot.  We begin building these simple raised bed kits, and we struck a cord-- the last two seasons we couldn't recruit volunteers fast enough to help us build them and stay in stock for the growing demand. 

We also are committed to telling people how to build them, what it costs, and in training volunteers to help us do so.  The 8" beds cost about $14 including hardware and corner posts, minus labor.  We sell those for $25, and the 14" beds for $35.  Our profit support our efforts to install free raised bed gardens for low and no-income families.  

Local folks in Southeast MI can buy 4 x 4 foot raised beds (8” or 14” tall) from Growing Hope.  We’ll also share information about how you can build your own raised bed, and give you tip sheets for growing in raised beds.  The beds are available at our annual spring plant sales. 

We also encourage you to become a part of our Four Square Society, a community-wide (potentially world-wide) effort to engage people in tracking their harvests, to better help us understand and quantify the impact of small-plot, intensive gardening.  There are 66 raised Four-Squares in our hoophouse, and many more outside at the Growing Hope Center, demonstrating, as we like to say, "What You Can Grow In A Square."