Building my Island Raised Bed: My Garden Day 3

Moving on to day 3 of my garden building project with the center raised bed island. (See day 2 and day 1) Unlike day 2 when it rained on me ALL DAY it didn’t rain on me at all this time! In fact it was a really lovely day that wasn’t too hot for working outside. Just like with the raised beds on the outside I would be using the 3×4 foot black steel railings that I purchased from Menards. First thing was first though I needed to cut one of the panels in half.

Have I mentioned before how I feel like the angle grinder should be a mandatory tool in everyone’s workshop?

Well, it should.

They’re not terribly expensive. They’re easy to use and they can cut through just about anything.

I grabbed mine and cut one of the railings exactly in half leaving two 2 foot wide panels for each end of my island. With three full panels on either side this will give me an island that is 12×2 feet and plenty of room to walk around it.

My first decision was if I wanted it perfectly centered or more toward the front or the back.

I chose to position it farther to the back, leaving a couple extra feet of room between the island and the front gate. It feels like more room than I need for a walkway and I really like that. I may put some big pots of flowers (or something) at the end of the island!

The walkway is 3 feet wide all the way around with about 5 feet in the front.

As with everything in this garden I sacrificed ALOT of zip ties just to make my life easier. I’ll have to replace all of them with steel wire at some point but the ease of them in this rather tedious build helped a lot.

I dug in and zip tied all of the steel panels together than cut, doubled up and wrapped in weed fabric the Styrofoam board for the lining. I also added wire, lashing the island together through its center for support.

Like with my outside raised beds nothing was real sturdy at this point but I had faith!

So a couple of years ago I suffered the loss of what was my favorite tree on this entire property. It was a GORGOUS ancient oak right in the front yard. It protected the house from dust and noise from the dirt road out front and the master windows from the South sun, giving a ton of shade all summer long…

Unfortunately, she just up and died and I had no choice but to take her down. I actually cried that day! Not just because I loved that tree but the last night of my doggos life he was outside just sitting under it and gazing up at the stars before he passed in my arms.

So I buried him under it and I always thought of it as his tree.

This property has THOUSANDS of trees, why did that one have to go?!

Anyway, this left me with some really enormous logs just hanging out, waiting for a big bon fire or… something.

Several years ago when I built my old raised bed garden I learned the hard way that you don’t need three feet of dirt to grow vegetables! But I filled those beds entirely with dirt anyway and they took an ENORMOUS amount of dirt…

I hauled what must have been 50 bags that day in my poor little car!

I was NOT going to do that again and it felt like a wonderful use for some of that gorgeous old oak. I grabbed the dolly and rolled log after log into the island. They were just about the perfect size.

From there I put what I could in the raised beds on the outside of the garden but I had no intention of killing myself or my back as anything I put in them would have to be lifted up and over the 3 foot tall railing. Yeah, why didn’t I move the logs here BEFORE enclosing the outside raised beds?!

So my gaze turned to the pile of firewood by my burn pit.

I hooked up the yard cart to the lawn mower and got to hauling! It took a LOT more wood than I would have guessed but I got it done and that was day 3 complete with lots of cheering!

Nothing left now but the dirt!