Rough construction heart redwood. Marco and I built these Wednesday. We attached welded wire mesh (1/2″ by 1″ openings) to bottom edges of boards, nailed down with 1 by 2’s for gophers. Filled up with compost and top soil. Makes me happy just to look at them. They’ve been in planning stages for a few months.
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
I presume that you used 1/2" chicken wire on the bottom?
makes me pretty happy to look at them…
we have garden boxes, ours are not as high.
I am thinking ours should be higher
One thing my husband did, was pound in nail truss plates on each join. It has made a big difference (I think) on holding them together.
ours are just planks from the lumber yard, with these plates, they are still holding good after ten years.
Where does one find heart redwood these days? Would love to have some…
Most lumber yards in northern California have it. Got these at Goodman's, Mill Valley, Calif. They have a 15% discount on all purchases on Sundays.
In areas where there is no redwood, rough-sawn heart cedar works well, although expensively. Avoid treated spruce. Unless you get the preserved wood foundation grade, which is absolutely soaked in evil preservative, it does not work well and you will be lucky to get five years out of it before it rots.
Many years ago, I built nice looking planters out of used railroad ties which were heavily impregnated with coal tar creosote, a known carcinogen. Probably a very bad idea, although I'm still here!