Is treated lumber safe to use in your raised beds? This is a question I get quite a bit, especially when I post pictures of my raised beds and more specifically my newest raised bed that my husband built for me. That's made of pressure treated lumber. People ask me, why did I choose to use pressure-treated lumber?

And that is a question that I think is worth answering, because it's a question I asked myself.

When we first started gardening, it really wasn't even an option. Lumber was lumber, as far as we

were concerned, and we got the pressure- pressure treated pine because that was the cheapest.

And so that's what our early raised beds were made of.

As we continued adding raised beds, we continued using the same thing we had always used.

This year I decided to build a large raised patio kitchen garden and it's about 30 inches tall and it is really really large but before we

bought any materials i decided to do some concentrated research i wanted to find out for sure if i

wanted to continue using pressure treated wood or if i needed to fork out the big bucks for cedar.

And here's what I found.

We just don't know if pressure treated wood, the modern pressure treated wood, which I'm going to share with you in a minute,

is safe because there's not a lot of studies.

However, the studies that have been done seem to indicate that this wood is safe.

I personally feel comfortable with what I've read, and I'm going to link the resources that I found,

and all of these are from University Extension Services. I'm going to link them in a show

notes so you can take a look in greater detail at what I read. But I feel comfortable with using

pressure treated lumber in my garden. Partly because the non-pressure-treated rot-resistant

alternatives like cedar are two to three times more expensive.

And I would prefer to have more garden beds and grow more food with using the same amount of money than less food just to be able to afford the better lumber.

That is my personal preference and my personal opinion.

But like I said, the papers that I read from these university extension services set my mind at ease to some degree, mainly because the pressure-treated lumber that most people were concerned about

hasn't been in use since 2003. That was what was called CCA lumber, chromium, copper,

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