DIY Tiered Raised Garden Beds

I've had this post in draft form for a year and now I'm finally sharing it.
That's what happens when you get pregnant and loose all motivation.
If you missed my sister's raised garden boxes that she recently posted, click here.
Truth be told, I've been planning my dream garden for years.
I would search online for raised garden bed kits & I found many that I liked, but this one is the design that I loved.  Then I saw the price tag.
Don't get me wrong, I totally would have paid the price tag if I'd had the money, but alas, I did not, so my husband and I built these instead...
first, however, we recommend giving the lawn a good trim, with an efficient, quiet lawn mower!

We're not done with it all, but this is the first phase of my design.

I knew I wanted my boxes to be taller then just 12", so I thought the tiered look would be nice.

I'm hoping to add a ledge on each box for seating too.

This is my garden space, it's approx. 20' x 20', so it's quite a large area.

The year before last I rented a roller and flattened this area so we could start with a somewhat level space.

In this picture we were deciding where to place the boxes.

Then came the matter of wood. 

I would like to say this is all build with cedar wood, but it was too much for my budget & I'd read online that you didn't have to use cedar.

So, I bought treated 2"x6"s and cedar 4"x4"s.

Each L shaped box has 2-4'x4'x12" boxes & 1-4'x4'x24 box.

The first thing we did was cut the posts for each box & then the sides, then we laid them out to make sure we had all the right pieces.

To construct each box, we started with 3 sides of a 4'x8' box.

And we left the fourth side 8' so we could add a 4'x4' box to the end.

After we had our L-shape, we added a 4'x4' box on top.

This is the final product.

I haven't been real specific in the construction, but hopefully my pictures explain well enough.

Really, it was a lot of numbers and measuring on paper with my design before we cut anything.

Then during construction, we had to remember to overlap the ends differently on each end, so the box would match up measurement wise.

We did have to take out screws and re-do some of the wood because we'd forget which way we were overlapping, but that's why it's helpful to have at least two people working together on this.

This is what my garden looks like right now.

Next year I'm hoping to add a 3 tiered square box in the middle for just strawberries.

Then maybe the year after that, I'll have some nice rubber tiles to pave the entire floor around all the boxes.

First things first though, I'll have to get more dirt next year.

I had no idea how much dirt it would take to fill these boxes.  It took us two pick up truck loads just to fill these boxes half way.  Hopefully someone will be building next year and we can bum some dirt off of them :)

Here are a few pics of what's currently growing.

Here's a link (Mel's Mix) to the soil mixture that I'd ultimately like to use.

This year I did my soil a little different because I didn't realize how expensive the vermiculite was.

I'll be saving up for next spring.