How To Make A Raised Vegetable Bed With Green Oak Sleepers

Growing your own fruit and veg has seen a massive surge in popularity during the Coronavirus lockdown, with seed manufacturers reporting an increase in sales and the Royal Horticultural Society revealing a spike in visits to its website.

If you’re considering growing your own – or want to extend your current veggie plot – raised beds made with green oak sleepers offer a number of advantages over the traditional vegetable-growing space. One major plus point of raised beds made with green oak sleepers, is that there’s space to add a nice amount of nutrient-rich soil to help you get a good crop.

What’s more, you won’t have to bend down and strain your back when it comes to planting, harvesting and the dreaded weeding.

Making raised beds with green oak sleepers is simple…

Building a raised bed with green oak sleepers is very straightforward.

Simply cut your green oak sleepers to size (depending on how big you want your raised bed), then lay them out in a square or rectangle. You want the green oak sleepers touching at the corners.

Using coach bolts, attach the sleepers together at the corners (we would always recommend drilling pilot holes first).

If you want a deeper raised bed, you can layer up green oak sleepers one on top of the other. If you’re going to do this, make sure that you overlap the corner joints. If you’re going to make a deeper bed like this, you don’t need to attach the corners as described above. You can simply screw down through the second layer into the first. If you want a third layer, screw down from the third layer into the second layer.

Next, line your raised bed with a plastic membrane, add a few bits of rubble to the bottom for drainage and fill it with soil or compost.

…but there are a few things you need to consider

Make sure you’re happy with the positioning of your raised beds before you make them. Raised beds made with green oak sleepers are extremely heavy, so you don’t want to be moving them.

Depending on what you want to plant, think about how much sun the plot will get. Some plants prefer less sun (spinach, for example), while others thrive in sunlight all day long (such as tomatoes).

Make sure you can access all sides of your raised bed. Also, consider how far you can reach into your raised bed. You want to be able to reach the middle of the bed from each side, so there are no areas that you’re unable to use.

Order your green oak sleepers

Our green oak sleepers are 200mm x 100mm x 2.4m and are ideal to use in garden landscaping, including raised vegetable beds.

We hope we’ve inspired you to get gardening – don’t forget to send us your pictures!