William Moss: Gardening is a fun sport, it could be challenging sometime, but there are things we can do to make it easier on ourselves, like growing raised beds. Hi! I'm William Moss, Master Gardener with the National Gardening Association, and today I'm at the Historic Oatlands here in Leesburg, Virginia. And we're going to show you how to build raised beds. There are a lot of advantages to raised beds. One, it's elevated, so there's less bending and stooping for tired knees and sore backs. Also elevated gardens drain a lot better. So you have a good drainage as opposed to be in heavy clay which may stick a bit, and you get to add your own soil, so you can use whatever compost or soil mix you like best, you can make sure it's in there.

Finally, one of the biggest advantages is fewer weeds, if you lay a tarp down or a weed cloth before you put your bed in there, you can pretty much eliminate all those weeds from coming up through and bothering your garden.

You had a couple of options when it comes to raised beds. You can either buy the kits or you can build it yourself from scratch. The kits are really fairly simple and if you have ever stack legos or put together some Lincoln Logs, you'll have no trouble with that.

You simply lay out the pieces out; put the corner pieces in, now you know everything is there. So now you can take the corners and start to slide the boards between, and so in the time it took you to watch this video, you could go out yourself, and put together a raised bed.

Now if the handyman out there who like to actually build with the wood and cut and saw, we'll cover some tips to make sure your bed goes in well too.

The bed we're going to build today from scratch is going to be built out of 44 lumber, and we're going to make the bed 8 feet long and 4 feet wide, and to do that we need six timbers that are 448. We also need to have a saw to cut them in half, a pencil and a tape measure, just so we can make sure that we are in dead center and then we cut it down in the middle. You're also going to need spikes to secure one layer to the other.

You may need either nails and a hammer, at least 4-inch nails or screw and a drill, at least 4-inch screws. If you're going to put down weed cloth that needs to go down first. So weed cloth or landscape cloth down first underneath it and that will give you the bed that we're going to build today.

Remember to read the instruction manual thoroughly for all power equipment before use and for all warnings and safety instructions, safety first. So basically what we're going to do is take our eight foot long timber, and then cut them in half, and then we want to stagger them on the edges, the one layer down and the another layer down, so it would be two layers half.

When you actually put the lumber together and lay it out, make sure that you're doing it with the stagger, every layer should be staggered over. When you connect them together you need to connect both from in into the piece, also going across the top.

And of course, the last step is to fill the bed with your favorite soil mix or compost, and then plant. So you see two different ways to build raised bed which makes gardening more easy, which of course makes it more fun. Get out and grow.