How to Make Raised Beds with Recycled Pots

Are You Ready for a Raised Bed?  Not a Builder?

In honor of Spring prep, The Tropical Grower is featuring How to Make Raised Beds with Recycled Pots.  The hardest part about this project, in my opinion, was prepping the area of yard where I put them.  If you’re ready for a Raised Bed and you’re not a builder, or you just want an easy bed project, these raised beds go up fast.

When you say raised beds, most people picture neat little wooden boxes. You can buy them at Amazon or from Wayfair.  If I ever get some extra time, I have a variation of this planned for Our Garden (as always, I’m hung-up in sanding).  But Raised Beds can literally be built out of anything that will hold dirt, is open at the bottom, and isn’t toxic.  Think of the possibilities.

Why a Raised Bed

Why do people plant in raised beds?  Most plants grow better.  Win!  We like that in a garden.  Oh, you want details.  Okay, the majority of plants grow roots 12 to 18 inches below the soil.  If this area is filled with rich, well drained soil, the odds of getting a healthy plant go up.  Growing Tropical where most of our natural soil is sand,  you can see how that would make a big difference. 

Raised Beds deter bugs and weeds.  If you have bad soil, soil contamination, unbalanced nutrients, whatever, you are adding fresh stuff on top of it where your plants grow.  I, personally, am fond of the different levels of depth it gives Our Garden.  It also offers the perfect opportunity to plant in groups which plants like.  The soil warms earlier for you northern growers, and you can build them anywhere, especially small spaces.  And, did I mention you can built them with almost anything?     

Pots Were Not My Original Choice

Originally, I envisioned these concrete panels we had stored along the fence for the walls.  I’d been trying to decide on some way to reuse them, and I was at a place as a grower where I wanted some row crop areas.  With our soil, they would have to be raised.  One plus one sometimes equals two, and the panels become the walls in my head.  Until I finally tried to pick one up.

Yup, it fell to pieces.  At first, I thought I wasn’t being careful.  Now, this was a total mind lie.  I had not messed with them up to this point because they are heavy and in very long pieces.  It took me 4 shattered panels before I admitted they were toast to myself.  Okay, so the panels are being recycled as gravel.  I had to shift gears.

Recycled Starter Pots

Both My Mom and I are pot hoarders, especially the starter pots you purchase plants in.  Hoarders.  They have so many uses.  I found a Dragon’s Trove of gallon pots My Mom had stored behind the shed when we demolished the old one, about 50 pots.  Yes, 50 gallon sized started pots in good condition, and an idea formed.

Now, when I say I was ready for row crops, I mean it.  I wanted a significant area of sun to grow vegetables.  I used 42 gallon pots, for 3 separate beds, as the outside walls.  Because I was positioning these next to the pool deck foundation which is raised, the foundation provided the back wall.  While I could have used more pots for the back wall, we wanted the beds up against the foundation.  Concrete walls, in my opinion, are not pretty garden features unless they are covered in moss.  It’s a personal preference.

Made to Fit Your Area

For us, these were for row crops, but the project is literally made to fit any area or configuration, a giant circle kept coming to mind when I was building the square beds. Let your mind wander free.  You can use any number, of any size, pots as long as you have enough pots to form your walls.  I will say the starter pots are fairly straight.  Most pots are larger at the top and smaller at the bottom.  If you are creating a wall of pots, you don’t want large gaps at the bottom where they are supposed to be holding dirt.  You will be using a liner, but the less space, the less likely you are to have a blow out. You can also punch yard stakes through the starter pots to hold them in place. The harder the material of pot, the less likely you will be able to use stakes.

If your pots are smaller than 12 to 18 inches high, you’re going to have to cut into your ground soil to make sure you have enough area of fresh clean soil.  So, choose your pots according to the project.  Do you want to dig into the soil?  Do you want to battle dirt seeping through the cracks. First things first, make your Plan according to the pots you want to use.  

Making Raised Beds with Recycled Pots Checklist

1	Make Your Plan: Decide on an Area, Your Pots, and a Lay-out
2	Do A Dry Run and Lay-out Your Pots
3	Cut Your Outline, Turn the Dirt and Remove the Vegetation
4	Place Your Pots & Secure with Yard Staples
5	Line the Inside of the Bed
6	Fill the Pots, and then, the Beds
7	Add Your Finishing Touches
	You’ll Need: Recycled Pots, Yard Staples, Bed Liner, and Fresh Dirt

The Plan

While the area was agreed upon, I had to figure out the lay-out based on me doing the growing in them.  I needed something that worked for me.  While I would have loved the extra planting area making rows down the entire side of the pool deck would have allowed, it made the back row hard to reach.  Dividing them into 3 beds allowed a much needed space for me to get into the beds without me climbing into them (which I do anyway).  If I did it again, I would have divided it into 4 beds to reach the back row better, but I’m short.

The beds are all different lengths, but they are all 3 feet wide.  This allowed for 3 standard, 12 foot rows in each bed.  Each row can be divided into 2, 6 inch rows for crop vegetables such as carrots or widened, combining the rows, to space big growers like broccoli.  Each of the pots is a container for a plant or plants.  That’s 4 rows of vegetables for each bed I planned.  Lots of growing space.

Do a Dry Run

Once you know where you want your beds, see if it works.  Place your pots where you want the walls.  Do they fit? Do you like it? Make adjustments to your Plan if necessary. Don’t skimp on this step and find out you need 6 more pots when you’re standing there covered in sweat and dirt.  It takes minutes and gives you a perfect outline of where the ground needs to be cut and turned.  

At this stage, I realized I needed a bigger space between the beds as my original plan would have had my bottom hitting the plants in the opposite bed.  We had 2, 2 ½ gallon buckets I chopped the bottoms out of and placed between the beds.  It spaced the beds better and gave me 2 new raised bed containers.  That would be a Yippy!

Cut Your Outline

While your pots are still in their correct place, mark the outside outline of your Beds.  I took the shovel and cut the weed grass by inserting the shovel about 6 inches into the ground all the way around.  I’m not going to lie, I was not careful and shot the empty buckets around in a few spots and had to reposition them.  I could have used chalk, or paint, or string to mark the outline, but I didn’t.  I had a shovel near my hand, and you don’t get any more precise than marking the actual thing going there. Not that it mattered for me as I was clearing the whole area, but it was helpful to have an outline of the beds while I was working.

Our Plan included clearing the entire area, because I wanted rock around the raised beds.  Weeds.  Mowing made easy.  Separation.  The whole area needed to be cleared.  The outline of the wall was the internal line of the area.  Based on where it landed, I ended up clearing the whole side of the pool deck foundation about 6 feet deep.

Prepare Your Ground

For us, preparing the ground meant stripping the entire area as I mentioned.  When I started getting past the top layer of vegetation, there was no doubt in my mind they cut the pool deck rock here, washed out at least one concrete application, and there was a decomposing pile of debris.  It wasn’t surprising as this was one of the areas I reclaimed from a weed and palmetto forest when I started taking care of Our Garden.      

Start by Removing the Vegetation

All the vegetation was removed.  Since this was weed grass packed to rock hard in sand, I used the shovel to remove the top soil.  While a rake, the one with the hard metal prongs, is usually the tool recommended for this task, the soil was way too hard.  I couldn’t even get the pitch fork into the dirt deep enough to do anything.  

Instead, from my outline cut, I inserted the shovel between the sand and vegetation skimming along the top, and the sand started to break apart.  Toss the vegetation in the shovel.  Insert the shovel, loosen the dirt, skim the vegetation on the next section in, and so on until I was done.  I hope you have grass or dirt.  Loosening the dirt underneath with a pitch fork usually allows any vegetation on top to be pulled out in big clumps with the rake or by hand.  Our sand filled with rock was a real sweat-fest and made this the most difficult part of the project for me.

Leave the Ground Soil or Remove Some of It?

If you have decent soil in the area where your raised bed is going and you have at least 12 to 18 inches of fill depth, you probably don’t need to remove any soil in the raised bed area, just loosen the soil the bottom of the bed.  However, you will want to bury the bottom of your pots.  Whether you leave the ground at the level where it is and add dirt around the bottom of your pots or cut the dirt and sink your pots below the current ground level, you want the bottom of the pots buried an inch or two for stability.

Due to the weird construction in our area, I removed about a foot of dirt inside the raised bed areas, piling the dirt, minus rocks and debris, in kind of a row outside where the pots were going to be located to bury them once in place. Because of the super hard dirt, it was mostly chopping up the area, removing rocks, and chopping more.  Super fun.  Did I mention I did this in the summer?  I’d finish with a layer of sand stuck to the sweat on my body.  Chuckling out loud here. It was like being a giant piece of sandpaper.

Place Your Pots and Secure with Yard Staples

While I could have turned all the pots into raised beds by removing the center portions of the bottom, I did not.  I wanted some containers for experimenting.  We get some extra large veggies in the tropics, and I wanted to see what containing them does.  You can always remove the bottoms later, but you can’t put them back once they’re gone.  I did, however, punch more holes in the bottom of the pots.  Then, I carefully placed them in their spots, using a yard staple or two to keep them in place.  Long thick, heavy yard staples.  I always have a box on hand.  

Technically, you could skip the yard staples, maybe add something heavy like rock, but I wouldn’t risk being able to move these around too easily.  They are the walls.  Think, yanking on mature plants to get them out of the ground, your knee having to rest there while you do something on the back row, blah, blah, blah, these things are going to see some use and heavy handling.  You want them to be secure.

The Goal is a Solid Wall of Pots

Make sure your pots are touching all the way down.  I used a rubber mallet to punch the staples through the bottoms of the pots, and all the banging moved the pots around a bit.  If you don’t have an extra set of hands to hold them in place while you bang Christmas out of them, you could actually pre-drill your staple holes in the bottoms of the pots.  Go for a size smaller than your staple for a tight fit.  

Remember to reposition your pots – BEFORE – your staples go all the way into the ground.  LOL.  I had to pull up a pot or two.  You need a solid wall to hold in your dirt, and a little effort now will save fixing it when you’re installing the liner.   

Your pots are going to be a little loose until you fill them, but they shouldn’t be moving around easily.  Add more staples if they’re really loose.

Fill Around the Bottoms of the Pots

If you’re burying the bottoms of your pot below ground level, backfill around the bottoms at this point.  Or you can just add dirt around the bottoms, if you aren’t burying them.    The point is to make them stable.  If your pots are moving around while you are trying to fill around the bottoms, you can insert more staples, rock or add a couple of scoops of sand or your fresh soil to the inside to help keep them in place.  You’re not quite ready to fill the pots, but some in the bottom is fine.

We had a wide area and a great deal of dirt removed from the raised bed areas.  Remember I removed a foot.  So, I didn’t so much bury the bottoms of the pots as raise the ground level around them and the whole side of the pool foundation, sloping the area down towards the drainage ditch.  It is a very mild slope, but you should always be thinking drainage when you mess with ground levels.  Does it slope toward where you want the water to go?  I’m currently redoing all the dry detention in this whole area.

Line the Beds

To help hold everything in place, I lined the inside of the beds (a.k.a. the pots), with a weed barrier mat.  They actually sell plant bed liners and plastics for the purpose of lining planting beds.  There’s burlap, hay, and even very fine screen. You can recycle or reuse something you have, or buy new, just make sure you don’t use something toxic.  I chose the weed barrier mat because I have several rolls of this type on hand.  Originally, I purchased them as weed barrier mats, but this woven type does not hold up to the tropical sun.  It disintegrates after a season or two.  That’s okay, we repurpose, here.  They make terrific bed liners.

The mats can be cut to size, and I made long strips, the size of each bed, a little higher than the pots.  It comes in rolls. I measured the beds and rolled out the length, cutting the roll in the middle the entire length into two strips. 2 beds liner done. 

Positioning the mat with the top just under the tops of the pots, the bottom falling into the hole where I removed dirt, I inserted a staple through the mat into the side of the pot.  You want to start at a corner, I started at the pool foundation, and work your way around.  I only inserted staples into the top corner pots and a couple on the long runs, not in every pot.  Remember, once the dirt is in place, the liner will be very secure. Also, inserting the staple at a downward angle, helps keep them from sticking straight into the side of the pot making it difficult to move dirt around inside.

Dirt, the Filling

What you fill your beds with depends on what you want to grow.  As I’ve mentioned, we are growing row crops in these beds, vegetables for the most part.  You want to fill based on what you are growing.  Most plants like rich, well drained soil.  While that can mean a lot of different things depending on where you’re growing, for us, Growing Tropical, it means a mix of compost, or new rich soil, and sand. 

These beds were set up with Black Sand in the front and Sandy Compost in the back.  While I can grow most things in Black Sand here, I really only mix it special in beds and containers for root vegetables, particularly carrots and sweet potatoes.  

Front Beds, Black Sand

Black Sand is a mix of compost, minus the chunky stuff, and sand.  Start adding sand to your cleaned compost until it looks like black sand.  If it looks like compost, add more sand.  If it starts to look gray, you have too much sand.  While I will rotate the front beds to other plants for the health of the bed, their main plants will be root vegetables.  

Back Beds and Pots, Sandy Compost

Sandy compost is the standard for vegetables here – rich, well drained soil.  Because these beds were so big, I used a mix of Yard Compost, Garden Compost, a supplement of Black Cow, and Yard Sand to fill the back of the beds and pots.   I wanted to start with the richest soil possible.  Adding a dose of Black Cow to the Yard Compost helps bring it into super-rich status, more like Garden Compost.  While I would have preferred to fill everything with a Garden Compost and sand mix, I just didn’t have enough for the whole project.

Commercial Compost or Dirt

The simplest way to fill your beds is bags of ready made richness.  You just buy it.  The hardest part is getting the bags to the area.  There are lots of companies that make good stuff.  While there are lots of benefits to making your own compost, it isn’t essential to growing.  Look at the mix.  Does it look like the good stuff in your yard?  Is it so filled with organics that it doesn’t drain properly or dries out too quickly?  Too much sand or silts to look rich and dark?  We’ve purchased many many different kinds, adding and subtracting to find something that works well in our yard. You want something that is similar to the best stuff in your area because you are growing in your area. Nature will show you what works there. Supplementing that with rich dark goodness is the key to success. Finding that in a ready-made bag takes some research.          

Fill the Pots

Filling the pots first for stability is helpful.  I added a little of the Yard Sand to the bottom of the pots, about ½ inch, for extra stability and drainage while I was moving them around.  Then, I filled them with my sandy compost mix.  Nothing special or interesting, just scooping in loads of dirt a little at a time until the pots felt stable.  I did pack the dirt, firmly, but not hard.  Then, I moved on to the beds.

Fill the Beds

Because we wanted two distinct growing soils in all the beds, it was a little more involved than just shoveling dirt into the beds until they were full.  Hint, Hint.  This is really the only thing you need to do for your project.  Fill with fresh rich, well drained soil or soil suitable to what you want to plant there.  

While I could have placed a board or other barrier between the beds, filled each side, and removed the barrier, I did not.  I shoveled two strips into the beds, Black Sand into the middle of the front section and Sandy Compost into the middle of the back section.  It looked like I was making two large rows for crops.  When my rows both reached a little over halfway filled, I used my hands and pushed the two tops of the rows together meeting at the center point between the two where I wanted the line.  I added another strip of Sandy Compost to the back and Black Sand to the front to even out the bed.  Then, I walked all over it and compacted it down.  Repeat, until the bed is filled.

Now the Frills

When I was telling my family about the Plan for the Raised Beds, their faces all looked strange by the end.  I was growing more vegetables in rows.  What seemed strange about that?  Scale?  I always think big.  No surprise there.  It took me a couple of plan run-throughs before I realized my family was waiting for more, the artistic part.  I’m an artist, by nature.  It’s in the way I look at the world.  There’s a scientist in there too.  Yeah, they’re constantly at war.  But projects look finished in the end, no matter how exacting and detailed the construction.  I was proposing a bunch of temporary pots lined up in a row.  Okay, I get the looks.

You can put any finish you want on the pots: paint, a stone or brick finish might look funky with the curved wall of the pots; they have outside wallpaper or vinyl finish you can stick on; my brain toyed with the idea of weaving some freshly pulled vines in a kind of fencing, we have so many vines and it looks cool around the big pot; let your creative juices fly; or leave them bare.  I will tell you from experience once these are planted, you barely notice the pots. Ours have some groundcover growing up them, on purpose. I haven’t decided if I like it

Rock Path

The plan always included adding rock around the outside of the raised beds.  Besides trampling the area mercilessly while working in the beds which would have made sandy mud, I wanted a weed and bug barrier besides just the natural one of the Raised Bed.  I like to be able to spray around our vegetables without actually spraying them.  It’s a personal preference.

Because the entire area around the pots was cleared and leveled in a slope with the natural soil being sand, all the hard part of a rock path was done.  As with everything, it needs to drain, you don’t want puddles of water or holes to twist your ankle while you’re working. Sand is the standard almost everywhere to float any type of rock, brick, or paver path. The only thing left was installing borders and netting to keep the rocks in place.  

Borders and Netting

Containment or keeping your rocks in their planned area is helpful for a long-term project.  I chose recycled powdered coated aluminum framing pieces as our borders.  Those are the frame part of lanai and pool screen enclosures.  I’m not sure where exactly all ours came from, but we have a bunch in our random building supply area.  Some of them were definitely damaged in storms and replaced with new pieces.  You can use logs, bricks, big rocks, or there are many cool borders in all finishes and styles you can buy.  I try to reuse or recycle first unless I have a specific plan.

Since I wanted containment, not an extra step-up into the bed area, the borders are buried deep with only a small lip to keep the rocks inside.  This was helpful since I stand on them regularly. Then, I covered the whole area in a heavy plastic netting.  We have a major problem with sinkage.  Yes, that’s right, rock sinks below the surface of sandy soil in a season or two.  I do not want to dig up rock every couple of years, been there, done that.  The netting holds the rock on top and lets any sand or soil fall through.  Although I will tell you, every few years, it helps to shake all the dirt through the netting.  

Rock

All the rock dug out of the area during the initial clear and removal of the foot of soil from the raised bed areas got thrown into pots.  I used those first for the initial layer of rock.  There were a couple of other random pots of rocks I dug from other projects that went into the area as well.  The parts of the concrete panels that disintegrated when I picked them up also were added.   Initial layer of rock complete.  Eventually, I will break down the rest of panels and add more, but that is a project for a different day.

Critter Protection

We like our vegetables to be fenced.  We have critters and use a green coated wire fencing and simple stakes to keep them out.  This includes wayward dogs looking for the bathroom.  It comes in rolls and is simple to install with my hands, a pair of wire cutters, and the rubber mallet.  I use a height I can step over.  

We haven’t had a problem with birds in this bed.  They have been horrible in the front area this year with the tomatoes, but they haven’t been interested in anything planted here.  When they do, I will string some fishing line up.  Outside restaurants and decks down at the beach use this method to keep the seagulls away from diners.  The fishing line confuses their sight and makes it difficult for them to fly into the area.  While it works pretty well on most species, there are some it work not at all, but it helps otherwise.

Happy Raised Row Crop Beds

I, personally, have been extremely pleased with these beds.  The back areas are a little hard to get to with my short body and arms, but they are growing and producing exactly as planned and look super green.  I also get to force my family to look at all the vegetables from the pool area when we have meals out there.  Bonus for me.  The coleslaw you’re eating is from that cabbage plant.  Can you see me smiling? You can check out the photos of this winter’s crop at: Veggies, Fruits & Herbs Photos, or read the blog update at: Fall & Winter Crop Update – Vegetables and see these beds in full swing.

Get Out There and Reuse Your Pots

Recycle your Pots into something useful and Enjoy your Green!