If you haven't already, now's the time to start getting your garden ready for fall! Even if the temperatures are still sweltering where you're at, you can still check out seed catalogs and order the fall seeds you want to plant. Anything that needs to start from seed should do fine indoors, as long as you have a sunny enough window where you can set your trays.

Once the seedlings sprout, you're also going to need a place to transplant your fall fruits and veggies. You can plant them in the ground, but a raised bed makes gardening a lot easier. It provides natural weed control, especially if you lay some reclaimed cardboard boxes and newspaper down underneath, and if you live in an urban area, planting in a raised bed is a great way to get around contaminated or bad soil.

If you're going to build your raised bed out of new wood, make sure you choose untreated wood. Treated wood is soaked in chemicals, and you don't want them leaching into your food.

New wood isn't the only option for building a raised bed. Check out this great video on how to build a raised garden bed from reclaimed windows!

The only word of caution I would give: depending on how old the windows are, you may want to test to see if they were painted with lead paint. You can pick up lead testing kits at most home improvement stores for under $30, and one kit will do a lot of testing.