Building, making, maintaining raised beds and stand-up planter boxes is something my family has experienced and done for three generations of efforts.
Pro’s and Con’s to every material and method that has been used.
Costs. Availability of cheap and free Obtainiums.
GrandPa Jack Unruh (a professional welder/fabricator) made his for GrandMa Mae out of WW II cut in half Victory ships air and others tanks. Thick formed and riveted steel; very thick heavily hot galvanized. None thought of zinc or iron contaminations. I believe though they may have been staying, early Spring cold, for too long.
Other family members loggers, mill-men made theirs of heart cut old growth cedar. Or heart cut old growth Fir.
They rot after a few years in use. Some try to buy time by heavily painting the insides before filling with soils. All of the exterior paints had lead in them back then.
Sigh. Then I can remember as a kid some-one would dig them out and soak them with used motor oils. Took a year or so for that taste to calm down. Some plantings did not like the heavily contaminated motor oils.
There was others who would source out take-out, removed wooden railway ties. These were very heavily forced creosote-tar impregnated. Oh sure. Last for a decade or so. Pre-leached for the railway service actually not tastes transferring. And the plantings did not seem to mind. Still . . . a lot in my parents generation did come down with cancers.
JoepK the VEGO systems I got for the wife and the Australian companie’s version are 5?, 7 layers? multi-coated. May be a base coat is a zinc. The top coating is a baked on acrylic enamel I believe. They are also before stacking packing are individually thin clear plastic shrink wrap coated. To prevent getting scratched.
Supposed to like a sunburn skin; peal that off prior to SS fasteners bolting together. I did not on very many panels if the shipping plastic was smooth with no bubbles.
I hope it will buy a few years or more.
Ha! Ha! Crazy woman wife now to be 70 in just over a week; makes me build and plan for another 20 years.
So a worrier could fuss about plastics leaching. No diffnert than using plastic buckets. Plastic seeds staters trays. Lining wooden constructs with a thick black layer of black poly sheeting.
Easy equation. First: don’t starve. Then grow for nutrient density and storability. Growing for your self you have awareness and control.
Worry. Worry. Worry about planted fears is their most basic control-you tool.
A Zebra chooses to live un-domesticated Free with its wild herd exchanging potential years of being alive versus being Horse, Donkey human-purposes protected.
Zebra knows . . . the human gets starving and then food becomes you then.
The human can get distracted busy and you will up to your knees in your own shits and mud, never be given enough food and water.
Now here is an odd to me, decades now observation.
We who came and stayed to what was to become America (the U.S. part of it) it was mostly a firm rejection of the millennia Old-World systems of respect and obey/follow your betters. Whether Royalty of a Church. Systems that had to keep the majority as serving, subservient to the few.
So those of us born and bred here; and the come here recently for these values of freedom of choices, are darn sick and tired of the pushing insistence for all to respect, self-awarding know-it-all claiming over-educated current Elites.
Recreate that which was rejected by our forefathers?? How incredibly stupid.
Make a choice for your get up off your knees planter boxes. Make it work. Gather in the hugs and kisses. Eat well.
Steve Unruh