Cheap Raised Garden Beds

The cheapest honest way to get a large steel bed, as long as you accept plain galvanizing instead of an Aluzinc coating.

If the goal is to grow the most food this year for the least money, area beats coating. A large cheap bed you can actually fill will feed you better than a small premium one, and Land Guard exists for exactly that calculation.

Understand what you are giving up. Plain galvanizing is a zinc coating; Aluzinc adds aluminum and magnesium and holds up considerably better at the soil line, which is where beds fail. Expect good years rather than decades.

The panels are thinner too, so use the supplied braces and do not skip the center support on the long sizes.

Skip it if: you want the bed to outlive the mortgage. Plain galvanized steel is fine for years, not decades, especially where soil stays wet.

The same zinc-aluminum-magnesium steel as the premium brand in a fixed shape, which is the trade most first-time gardeners should take.

Vegega is the value answer to the obvious question: if the steel is what makes a metal bed last, can you buy the steel without the premium? Largely, yes. Vegega uses the same zinc-aluminum-magnesium coating, and what you give up is the panel-swap modularity.

For a first bed that is usually the right trade. Most people put a bed where the sun is and then never move it, so paying for reconfigurability you will not use is a bad first purchase when the same money buys the soil to fill it.

Fill cost is the number beginners underestimate. A 4 x 8 bed at 12 inches of fill takes roughly 32 cubic feet, which is around sixteen 2-cubic-foot bags. Work yours out on the soil calculator before you choose a size, not after.

Skip it if: you genuinely expect to redesign your garden layout. Reshaping is the one thing this bed cannot do, and it is exactly what Vego charges extra for.

A fabric raised bed rather than a pot: wide enough to plant like a bed, cheap enough to buy two, and it folds flat in October.

This is the grow bag that behaves like a bed -- Smart Pot has also sold it as the Big Bag Bed. At roughly 50 inches across it gives you about 13.5 square feet of planting area -- the same growing area as a 4 x 4 ft frame -- in something that arrives folded in a flat parcel and needs no assembly at all.

Twelve inches of depth is the number that matters. That is enough for lettuce, beans, chard, bush cucumbers, peppers and determinate tomatoes, and it is shallow for carrots, parsnips and a serious potato crop. It is the same depth limit a shallow metal or vinyl bed has.

The cost is the fill. A bed-sized bag needs a bed-sized volume of potting mix, so the bag being inexpensive does not make the project inexpensive. Work out the mix cost first, using the soil calculator on this site, because that number rather than the bag decides whether this is the cheap option for you.

Skip it if: you want the garden to look built. This is a black fabric circle sitting on the ground, and planting around it does not disguise that.

Five bags for about what one rigid planter costs, and 10 gallons is the size that actually grows a tomato rather than keeping one alive.

Ten gallons is the useful number here. University of Maryland Extension puts the minimum container size for a standard tomato, a pepper, an eggplant or a cucumber at 5 gallons, so a 10 gallon bag is comfortably above the floor rather than at it -- which in practice means fewer collapses on a hot afternoon.

The fabric is mid-weight: thicker than the throwaway bags sold ten to a pack, thinner than the bonded-fabric pots that last a decade. For a first season, while you are deciding whether you like growing this way, that is the right place on the scale.

Fill them with potting mix, not garden soil or raised bed mix. Soil in a container compacts and drains badly, which is the single most common reason a bag of tomatoes underperforms the same plant in the ground.

Skip it if: you are growing root crops. Ten gallons is 11 or 12 inches of depth once settled, which is short for carrots and parsnips.

Real untreated cedar with tool-free dovetail corners -- the honest wood option, with the shorter lifespan that comes with wood.

Cedar is chosen for looks and for the fact that it is untreated, which matters if you are uneasy about what a pressure-treated board leaches into a bed you eat from. Cedar's natural oils slow rot without any chemistry at all.

The dovetail corner system is the reason to buy this particular kit rather than cutting boards yourself: the ends slot together, no hardware, and a second kit stacks on top to take a 7-inch tier up to 14 inches. That is worth doing -- one tier is too shallow for much beyond lettuce and herbs.

Set expectations on lifespan. In a wet climate a cedar bed is a multi-year item, not a permanent structure, and the boards touching soil go first.

Skip it if: you want to buy a bed once. Even cedar is a wearing part in a wet climate, and steel is the better long-run answer.