15 Viral Raised Bed Gardening Hacks You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner

Over the years, I have made hundreds of gardening videos with thousands of garden tips and tricks hidden inside. But I've never made just one video that combined all my best hacks together. So today I am sharing my 15 most popular gardening hacks in just one video. My first hack is never pulling a weed in the garden again. And the way I do this is by setting up the garden right the first time. Whenever I set up a raised bed garden, I make sure I clear all the ground cover that's underneath the bed before I plant. And then my major hack is throwing away all that nasty plastic weed barrier cloth and using brown paper, ram board, or cardboard instead. This works because this is a natural material that slowly breaks down. It doesn't put plastics under your garden and it keeps all of those root bound weeds from growing up into your garden space. So if you're still using weed barrier cloth, toss that stuff in the trash and start using brown paper instead. My second hack is taking one packet of seed and dumping the entire thing in just one garden bed. This works because plants love to grow together intensively. Now you can't do this with just any seed. This needs to be for leafy greens or for root crops. Most of those seeds are hard to keep separated and they're also hard to know how to space them out in your beds. What I do is take one packet of seed, mix it up with sand, and then spread it out throughout the entire bed. This makes the most, not just of every square foot in the garden, but of every square inch. I keep the beds well watered for two weeks and within 45 to 60 days, I'm picking harvest every single day from that one bed because I seriously over planted it. So if you're just picking a few seeds out of a seed packet and just planting a little with a prayer and a hope for good production, you gotta try my method of taking one packet of seed and just dumping it out in one bed. My third hack is planting the edge of my raised beds with tons of herbs to protect it from pests. I don't use any chemical pesticides in my garden. Instead, I use plants to protect everything I'm growing. Herbs are an incredible way to protect your garden from pests because one, they put off a strong scent that can repel pests or confuse them when they're heading toward your veggies. And two, they attract all kinds of beneficial insects that actually fight the bad guys off and do the heavy lifting for you. I use herbs like thyme, oregano, rosemary, basil. These are some of my best spiders in the garden that help me grow organically without ever having to use a spray. Hack number four is trading in my tomato cages for an arch trellis instead. Tomatoes, particularly the vining types, are not made to grow in a tomato cage. The plants overgrow a tomato cage within a few months and you're left with this huge spindly mess and you're unable to get to those tomatoes. Instead, I train tomatoes to grow up and over an arch trellis. This gives me five to six months room of growth as the plants go from one end of the trellis all the way to the other. I have easy access to the tomatoes the entire time that they're growing and the results are also incredibly beautiful. My fifth hack is working coarse sand into my garden soil. Most gardeners use peat moss in their soil blend but this has been proven to be a non-renewable resource. So instead of using peat moss, I work in coarse sand to my soil blend. Coarse sand allows my soil to get a lot of porosity, a lot of those great air pockets that vegetable gardens so desperately need. It lightens up the soil but it's taken from a resource that's much more renewable and sustainable. So instead of reaching for those bags of peat moss or a soil blend that's made with peat, make my 103 mix instead. It's got topsoil, compost, coarse sand, and earthworm castings all mixed together for a much more sustainable organic soil blend. Hack number six is overwintering your peppers. Most people don't know this but peppers are what we call tender perennials meaning they actually wanna live for many years in the garden. They just get stopped because of frost and cold and snow. So in the fall, I overwinter my peppers by uprooting them from the garden, trimming the roots a little bit, trimming back the top stems, putting them in a pot, and then bringing them indoors for the winter. You can let them go dormant or you can actually put them on a south-facing window if you're in the northern hemisphere. Let them stay inside during the winter and then pop them back out in the garden at the start of spring as soon as the threat of frost has passed. This makes the most of the money that you spent on your pepper plants and you can actually grow them year after year after year with this method. You gotta try it. My seventh hack is one of the best for so many of us that don't have a lot of sun on our garden and this is growing plants in the shade. Almost everybody I talk to says, Nicole, I wish I could have a garden but I just can't because I don't have any sun in my yard. But I have shared so many hacks on how to grow in the shade and the thing you wanna focus on are leafy greens. Herbs and salad greens love to grow in the shade. In fact, a lot of them struggle when they're growing in full sun. So if you've got a really shady yard, you've gotta check out my hack of growing greens, growing leaves in the shade. So we're talking gorgeous, delicious salad greens like romaine, buttercrunch, arugula, spring mix. All of these grow great in the shade and then we're talking herbs, delicious herbs that cost a ton at the grocery store like thyme and sage and chives. So if you've got a ton of shade in your yard, you can still have a garden. You just gotta use my hack and grow the leafy greens instead of the big fruit and crops. My eighth hack is how to keep bunnies out of your garden, at least how to keep them from eating your plants. And this is by setting up this really cool thing called a living fence. Most people are focused on building fences of wood and wire and setting up their garden like Fort Knox but instead the hack I use is creating a living fence. So a living fence is just that, it's plants that surround your vegetable garden and protect it from little critters like bunnies. So when you set up a living fence, you use pollinating plants, you use native plants, you use grasses and you let the plants do the fencing for you. This provides bunnies and rabbits a place to nest, to have their young and to even eat without having to come into your main vegetable patch to find some dinner. If you've had trouble growing cilantro, you gotta check out hack number nine and this is the way I grow loads of cilantro, literally tons of it every single year. And I do it by not growing it in the summer. You gotta ignore the cilantro that's being sold at the hardware store and the local plant store if they're trying to sell it to you in the middle of the summer. Cilantro loves cold, it likes cold weather. In fact, it doesn't even mind frost. So you wanna grow cilantro when it's cold outside, when there's a chance of frost. You can even put cilantro seeds into the soil right as winter is starting and they are gonna pop up and start growing for you as soon as the soil warms up just a little bit. It'll grow even when there's frost, even when there's cold. So stop growing cilantro in the summer and grow it in the spring, fall and even in the winter if you're in a mild area. Speaking of herbs, you've gotta follow hack number 10 which is putting all your herbs into just one container. All the herbs we have in the kitchen can mostly be broken down into a few plant families. First, we have the mint plant family and these are these big trailing herbs, things like rosemary, thyme and oregano and sage. So in one container, you can put those herbs around the outer part of the container. They don't need a lot of water, they don't mind getting hot and they all love to trail. So they can all go on the outside of the planter. Then we have the herbs that we love to grow that are in the onion plant family, things like garlic and chives and scallions. These can be grown right inside the container on the inside of those mint plant family herbs. They're not fussy at all, they don't care if they have a lot of water or not a lot at all and they also don't need a lot of sun to thrive. So these can be right on the inside of those herbs. And then finally, we have our herbs like cilantro, parsley and dill. These are more particular, they wanna grow up and they also have these deeper tap roots. So parsley, cilantro and dill, they go in the center of the container. So there you have it, one container filled with all the herbs that you want to eat in your kitchen. Cilantro, dill and parsley in the middle, the scallions, chives and garlic around the middle and then all of your trailing herbs along the outside. All the herbs you want, just one pot. Hack number 11 is throwing out that companion planting chart and understanding my plant categories instead. So my second book is called Leaves, Roots and Fruit and that is the method I use when I'm planting up my beds so that I'm never confused on what plants go together. So you can toss out all those charts and just use this method. Leaves go on the outside of the bed, root crops go in the next row and then your fruit and crops grow down the middle of each and every garden. You wanna be sure that you're growing the plants together, leaves, roots and fruit that all grow in the same season. So plants that don't like frost should grow together and plants that do like frost should grow together. So you find out if they like frost or not and then you divide them into the categories, leaves, roots and fruit, put them all together in one bed and never use a chart again. My 12th hack is growing a lifetime supply of Zinnia flowers after buying just one packet of seed. So when you buy a packet of Zinnia seeds, by the way, we have some right below this video for a steal of a deal, you empty them out and you'll have 50 to 100 Zinnia seeds right there. You plant them up and each and every Zinnia seed will start to produce flowers. When you prune the way I teach you, which is pinching back right above a leaf node, every time you cut one flower, you'll get two flowers in its place. So you keep doing this throughout the season and Zinnias will grow pretty much nonstop when there's no chance of frost. As you grow these Zinnias, you're gonna pick the plants that have the biggest blooms, cut those off when they start to fade and then put them inside in a place where they can start to dry. The next spring, you're gonna take each of those dried blooms and pull off every petal and hidden underneath each petal are seeds for that year. So one packet of seed could grow you thousands of Zinnia blooms in one season and each of those blooms can give you 30 to 100 more seeds for the following year. Garden math is crazy. My 13th hack is how to grow more food in less space with half the work and it's what I call my intensive planting method. You may have heard of square foot gardening. Well, this is square inch gardening. So I use every single square inch when I'm planting up my garden and I do it by putting the plants in a Tetris-like method, fitting them inside the garden so that there is no bare soil. So when you use my method that doesn't need a chart of combining leaves, roots and fruit that all grow in the same season together, you're gonna smoosh them all into one bed so that they each get the amount of space they need and nothing more. This makes the most of every single square inch in your garden. It cuts down on the work you have to do because these plants love growing together and it massively increases your production per square foot because you've got so many plants growing in one space. My 14th hack is all about making free plants. This is one of the very first videos I ever put out on YouTube and it's because it's the way that I started my business over 10 years ago. My mom taught me how to root plants at a time when we had little to no money to buy plants. She would take little cuttings of plants in her garden and showed me how to put them into sand, keep the sand moist and each of those little cuttings would create roots so that I could grow plant after plant after plant simply by cutting off the initial plant. Most other gardeners root their plants in water and while that method works great for growing roots, it often makes the transplanting process really difficult. But if you root those plants in a moist sand environment, they're gonna transplant into the garden so much easier and you're literally gonna be growing plants for free. And my 15th hack is never, ever, ever, ever using a synthetic fertilizer in my organic garden but still getting massive plants that produce week after week for me. Synthetic fertilizers are everywhere when you go to a garden center but they're actually terrible for your garden. Synthetic fertilizers run off and mess up our water system. They've been shown to negatively impact wildlife, pollinators and bees and butterflies that we care so much about. Plus, they stress your plants. They ask your plants to grow much faster than they naturally would and they create this unhealthy dependence where your plants are waiting on that fertilizer to do their thing. Instead, I use all the other hacks I've shared today, having great soil where your plants can grow, planting the plants intensively and then planting the edges of my garden with tons of flowers and herbs and things that are beneficial to the entire ecosystem so that we have bees, butterflies and just a naturally great environment that increases growth and makes the most of the natural resources available to each and every plant. You can watch the full step-by-step of each and every one of these hacks right below this video and you should start with my garden planting method. That's what made all these hacks come true. You can watch that video right here.