Raised Planter Boxes

I grew up in farm country, working on farms, and in the fields. I learned carpentry from one Grandfather, and my other Grandfather was a landscaper by trade. I worked in the garden with my Grandmother and Mom as a child, planting, tending and harvesting. Carpentry, plants, gardening and farming is in my DNA so to speak.

My wife Cheryl is also an avid gardener who in recent years due to health issues hasn’t been able to garden like she has in the past. Even with the raised garden beds I had built for her, it was just too difficult to down to that level to garden. She is my inspiration for raised planter boxes. Cold climate gardening has it’s own special challenges. Cheryl has been gardening in Alaska for over thirty years, there isn’t much she hasn’t seen or done, good and bad, in Alaska gardening.

So the two of us have conspired to create Raised Insulated Garden Boxes.. This isn’t the same as a “raised bed” garden. This is a garden that is raised to a working height of 30″, 32″, or 36″. One of the problems with container gardening in cold climates is you have to bring the containers inside if you want perennials to come back. Our design which includes insulation as well as other heat retention techniques allows perennials to return. The product is still evolving. We’re getting smarter about what we do and how we do it. Just so we’re clear, this is intended to be for profit, enough so that we won’t need our disability benefits anymore.

But when this started, we weren’t developing a product to sell. We had some recycled wood and cement blocks and I just figured if we can’t get down to the garden, we’d raise the garden up to us. But since then, we started to think, there are many people, maybe not just like us, but still unable to garden in more traditional ways. People with disabilities, people without yards, people who can’t garden because of where they live, like military bases and universities for example. Communities interested in community gardening, but no tillable ground or very limited space. Facilities like hospitals or long term care facilities whose patients could benefit from Horticulture Therapy or just the simple joy of gardening.

Set this with a backdrop of a national financial crisis, high unemployment, increased interest in eating healthy and living a more sustainable lifestyle. We realized we could be part of something bigger than just making a living and helping a few people in the process. We could change lives and communities. We could provide a model for others to create cooperatives in their community to introduce and promote gardening in “Raised Garden Boxes”. It would provide jobs, income, a healthier diet, and pride. There is nothing quite as uplifting as building something with your own hands, and literally eating the fruits (or vegetables) of your labor.

That is the vision for down the road. Right now, we are going to concentrate on building our local business and start a network of people and businesses that would like to be a part what we are doing. This is a bootstrap start up. We use as much recycled wood as we can get our hands on, but that still leaves us needing to purchase quite a bit of material. We also had to rent a small workshop because we don’t have the facilities at our home. But we’re going to make it, we are resolute, and we believe in what we are doing.

Thank you for visiting. We hope you join and contribute your thoughts, ideas, and encouragement.