THE BASIC LITTER BUCKET AND DRUM RAISED BEDS

As part of the overall garden program, we've adopted the raised bed approach, completely abandoning the ground garden concept for veggies.  Only the older fruit trees that were planted many years ago are still in the ground.  While the larger trees and bushes that have been recently established are in large drum planters as part of the raised bed concept, the veggies are planted in a couple variants of raised beds.  One utilizes drums cut in half and anchored in a wooden table while another uses eight cat litter buckets in a single table.  A couple of the raised beds we first made using some of the available wood have rotted away and were broken up, leaving the half drums and buckets.  The rebuilt beds are utilizing fresh pressure treated wood with plenty of support to hold the weight of the filled drums and litter buckets.  These two beds will be using the half drums and buckets from the old beds so there will be no need to resource those components.  
​

The half drum bed was assembled using wood screws. Since the half drums already had holes in them, I was able to use more wood screws with washers to hold the drums in place versus using self tapping screws to punch through the metal. Pallet boards will be added around each side to serve as added support to the table to hold up to the weight of the drums full of dirt.

The same basic layout for the raised bed is used for the litter bucket bed, with the difference being dimensions and an added board to provide support between the two rows of buckets. Available pallet boards are added around each side to add support to the table so the bed can hold the weight of the dirt in the buckets.

The bucket raised bed is moved in place alongside an old bucket bed with some spacing between the two to allow us to reach the rearmost plants. There are three buckets that are already planted from some leftover dirt and plants I had.