How To Make A Raised Bed Out Of A Plastic 55 Gallon Barrel

How to make a raised bed

We were inspired by a video on the Growing your greens channel called “Have your lawn and eat it too” and decided to figure out how to make a raised bed out of a plastic 55 gallon barrel for our lawn. Ours are a little different they’re bigger and we dug out a trench so they look better by the house.

How to build raised beds

How To Make A Raised Bed Out Of A Plastic 55 Gallon Barrel

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT – How To Make A Raised Bed Out Of A Plastic 55 Gallon Barrel

How to make a raised bed out of a plastic 55 gallon barrel – Video Transcript

So today’s gardening project we’re going to show you how to start with this (plastic barrel) turn it into this, and then it shall become this (raised bed). Modern Homemakers intro with theme song. So I’m going to cut this barrel in half long ways. Going to use my circular saw. Just be very careful make sure that you wear eye protection so that pieces don’t get in your eyes.

And it’s good to have somebody with you not do something like this alone in case something happens or you hurt yourself. (cutting the barrel) So I’m almost done cutting this in half. I didn’t quite cut it exactly in half. You might want to measure. I’m doing so many of these that I don’t really care that much. I’m just trying to get close, that’s all I’m trying to do for right now. Here we go.

Alright, so each barrel is gonna give us 2 beds to plant stuff in. So ‘m just going to drill some holes in here so that this will be able to drain. I don’t have one of those big huge bits, if I do I can’t find it. Probably going to do about 6 or so. So we had these flowers that were planted here before and there were these beds full of these pebbles and stuff.

Right now I’m just digging these out and I’m going to put in my barrels that have been cut long ways. Okay so I got a space dug out here you can see we’ve got this little pipe here I’m going to have to go around that a little bit. but the space I’ve got fits around there. So what I’m going to do is draw some lines to see where I’m going to cut on here. I’m going to cut the area out and then it should just fit right in. Keep working with it until it fits It’s not an exact science. We’re gonna have to cut that a little more to get that to fit. I’m going to have to cut much wider at least at the top here.

So as you can see I probably went a little too wide here but I’m not real concerned with that because this is going to be filled in with soil. But I do need to trim a little more here because it’s catching on this and then hopefully it will pop right in. Okay I’ve got my holes drilled here. And this one I don’t have to cut it just goes right in. See it fits right next to the other one I’ve got I still have to drill my holes in the other one but once I get these holes drilled I’m going to put in some soil and start planting stuff. Oh one more thing I’m going to do you can see I dug a little bit too much here so I’m just going to take some of the dirt that I dug out and fill that back in so that’s packed in tight. And that will look a lot neater.

Finished photos of the raised beds with plants and soil in them. You might also like How to make a soaker hose. Please subscribe to our youtube channel.