Whether your customer is interested in growing vegetables for their own dinner table or you’re working to create a community space for gardening, raised planter beds are a simple solution that can accommodate many planting needs.

If you’re installing a raised planter bed in a community garden or your client’s backyard, here are seven steps to follow.

1. Prep the ground: Determine where your garden bed is going to be located. Press and compact the ground there to make it stable for your garden bed—this is to make sure the soil underneath your garden bed is level and won’t wash away with erosion.

2.Design the frame: Determine the size, shape and height that best fits the area you are placing the bed. Then decide which materials you will build the frame out of. The most common material to use is wood, but you could also use metal or cinder blocks.

Pro tip: Make your garden bed two feet tall. This will allow kids to see the plants and help with gardening.

3. Build the frame: Construct all the sides. Align them the way you want, and where you want the bed to be located. Do this by propping the sides up with temporary supports. Fasten everything together with nails or screws and remove the supports.

4. Line the bottom of the frame: Before filling the frame with soil, line the bottom with landscape fabric or another permeable layer. This will allow water to drain through, but will keep things like weeds from coming up into the bed.

5. Fill the frame with soil: Make sure the soil is of good quality and matches the needs of your plants. You can enhance soil quality with soil amendments like Holganix or Mirimichi Green and fertilizers.

6. Connect the bed with irrigation: Install irrigation in your garden bed. It’s recommended that you use drip irrigation or micro-spray emitters—these will water on the ideal scale. Connect your drip irrigation to a smart controller to be able to program a watering schedule and have the most control over how your plants are watered.

7. Plant vegetables and plants: Finally, plant your plants in the garden bed and watch them grow!

Have you built a raised garden bed before? Send us photos and leave your own tips in the comments below.

Products you’ll need for this job:

• Hammer and nails
• Landscape fabric
• Soil
• Soil amendments and fertilizer
• Smart controller
• Irrigation tubing
• Valves
• Backflow device
• Drip/micro-sprays