We used the wonderful directions here to build it: http://www.hgic.umd.edu/_media/documents/hg601.pdf . It's pretty easy to build and the supplies are easy to find all at Home Depot or such. A few things to keep in mind though. 1- Make sure the battery is charged on your drill or saw. We recently bought ours and this was our first project, so we never took them out to charge up. We had to wait a while to be able to really use them and lost our daylight time, which is why the next point happened. 2- When assemblng and stapling the window screening to the frame, it may be helpful to do this on a light colored surface. We attached ours down in our basement where there was a section of dark carpet. Needless to say, one of us accidentally stepped inside the frame and ripped the screen halfway out.
You will step on it or at least almost, trust me.
3- Make sure when buying the rolls of hardware cloth, you get the right size. I for whatever reason didn't double check the width and it ended up being 10 inches to short. This involved us running to Home Depot right as they were about to close for the correct size. After we got back, we were anxious to finish and #2 (see above) happened.
Aside for these minor setbacks, it was really fun to build. It was definitely excited to move it outside and fill it up with the soil. We planted 3 rows of a lettuce mixture on one side and 3 rows of spinach on the other side. I plan on planting more rows again in a week or two, once these seeds are up.
Halfway filled with dirt.
The finished salad bed!
Planting our rows of seeds.
Our markers for the rows.
Our spinach seeds, all ready to be planted.
