Raised Bed Square Foot Gardening!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Today I'm going to talk to you about something that will be helpful to all of you that aspire to do some of your own vegetable crops, flowers, herbs, but you're constricted by space. You might live in suburbia or in the urban area, and you don't have any open area or very little in which to devote to gardening. Well, this is one in a series of another technique that you can utilize. It's in your tool bag that allow you to garden, even in a small space. We're going to talk about raised bed gardens. Now, you're having to be looking at a little bitty plot, a 4x4 plot of corn. And in future videos, I'll cover a little bit about raising corn in this area, but we're not going to cover that today. And this is also an intro to raised bed gardening. I'll get into another video showing you how to construct them, some different techniques and so forth. I'll just allude to them so that just in a few minutes we have together, you can get a good overview of raised bed gardening and why it may be a good tool for you to use. Well, the first thing to remember about raised bed gardening, the first principle is that you go up in raised bed gardening, hence the raised area, not down into the soil, the substrate. You don't have to use, nor do you typically use, your native soil. You can use potted soil, that is, or bag soil. You can use compost blends. And if you're using what Mel Bartholomew, who is the author of the all-new Square Foot Gardening Method, he uses a three-part by volume of vermiculite, compost, and peat moss. The point is, there's a lot of different things you can put in these boxes. Now, something to note, the boxes look quite shallow. If you look at them, they look more shallow in this particular case than they actually are because we have a fractured rock path around here for weed suppression, for comfort us working the garden. But they are actually only this wide. Let me show you some of the material that these are made of. This is a composite material that's typically used for decks. And as you can see, it's not very tall. It's about 5 1⁄2, 5 3⁄4 inches tall. And when that's set flat on the substrate, you're only going to have that much soil. And you may say, what's up with that? How in the world can you raise nice crops with only that much soil? Well, think about it. Most of our prairies, the mountains, don't even have that much soil and you have this wide biodiversity of all sorts of plant growth going on and it's just fine. You don't need that much depth. Now, you might be saying right now, what about root crops like carrots? Well, you put a box on a box to give more soil depth or use shorter miniature varieties. Those work just fine too. But here's the first thing. The construction of the box is simply a box of materials set up sideways. You can use this type of material. You can also use womanized lumber, which is the brown type of material. Two-by-six works very well. And you can cut those very readily on a standard saw and screw them together with exterior prime screws. You can use also vinyl, and we'll show you one of those in just a moment. A couple of other things to keep in mind as we go on here. These all need drainage. So when you put them on the ground, you're going to put down a weed block. Sometimes we use recycled material for large banners that go on signs, those sort of things, but you always have to perforate that material to assure that water drains through to stop the situation of water sitting at the bottom of the bed. If you do that, you're going to end up with putrid soil and you're put into what's called an anaerobic condition. That means that there's little or no oxygen, and the microbes that thrive in those conditions put off some very offensive odors and the plants can't live in it. So water has to move through and get out of the top, move through, and drain off the excess and not stand in it. The third thing to keep in mind with raised bed gardening is notice that this box is four foot by four foot. The reason for that, the average person can reach quite easily into the center of the garden from any side. If this happened to be backed up against a wall, along a patio wall or whatever, then you would only make it a maximum of three foot. 32 or 24 inches is better for you to be more comfortable working with it. One of the no-no's in raised bed gardening is you never walk in your own garden because as soon as you do, you compress the growing medium, making it difficult for the moisture to move through it, for the roots of the plants to be able to move through it and establish well. So you never walk in your garden. You always just build it big enough that you can work it from the exterior in. Now, I want to point out just a construction technique on this garden. If you'll notice over here, you can see the end of this one coming here and then this one tucked up to it. But if you pan across to the right here, notice the next one is tucked here and so it goes around the entire bed. What happens is if you just cut these, let's suppose you're doing a four foot by four foot, then you're just going to put one behind here and do the same pattern and it comes around to itself again. When you screw it all together, you've got a nice four foot garden. You generally do not want to make the garden more than 12 foot long for the simple reason that as soon as you're working the garden, you'll be tempted to jump through the middle or step in the middle instead of walking around. You get longer than that, it just gets way too long to walk around and you'll look around and see anybody looking and then you're going to step in your garden and that's a no-no. One other thing we want to point out here very quickly, and that is this garden over here. I want to show you this garden. This garden's fallow. It's at the end of the season. It was used to raise garlic, onions, and some other produce as well. We have now reconditioned the soil. It's getting ready to be planted again, but I wanted to show this to you simply because this is a little bit more of an upgrade. I really like this style. We have several of them around the property here. The biggest ones we have are 12 foot long by four foot long, and these are made out of vinyl gardening parts. These have UV protectants in them. They don't tend to sun rot. You don't need to paint them. They last multiple years. We have some that are about five years old. I've seen some of these in service up to seven to ten years that are still looking really good and will hold on. They're a little bit more complex to make. I'll just show you. I'm going to pop the lid on this and give you a basic idea, but in a future video, I promise you this. I'll give you the inside scoop of how to build these. We'll put together a jig and show you how to do it so you can make your own. But what I'm going to do is show you the little innards of this a bit. So if you notice at the corner, this is how these are held together. That's a regular five-by-five cap. This is a five-by-five post. So you look at all the things that are in there. But here's the point. These are routed in. The rails come through. They're drilled here, and again, in a future video, I'm going to show you the very specifics and measurements and the jigs I did to do this. A little piece of PVC pipe, half-inch pipe. I believe that's a seven-inch piece. It goes through to lock it onto the corner, and then those are pieces of rebar. They're number four rebar. That's a 24-inch stake that's simply driven the corner after we squared up the shape. One other thing you can't see in here is because it's a finalized garden, you can't see the weed barrier that's under it. So we use a commercial black polyester spun weed barrier that's under that so that you don't get weeds growing up through it. I've been asked about, is it okay to use railroad ties? How about some of the treated lumber that's been around for a while, the green type? Well, I've got to tell you, if you go up on the Internet and do some prudent research, you're going to find there's a fairly robust dialogue going on up there related to whether it's safe or not to do this. The dialogue has to do with the chemicals that are in the wood and whether or not they will leach into the soil, and then, thereby, the plants will uptake them through their root structure, and somehow it'll end up with you. And, you know, there's some pretty smart people on both sides that have some pretty convincing arguments. But I'll leave it up to you. You go and take a look up there and see if you do have railroad ties or you have some of the green lumber, whether to use it or not. There are people, though, that say they've used them for years, and they're pretty far up in years and living a healthy, robust life, and they're doing fine. So I'll leave it up to you. I hope that you found this video on raised bed gardening to be helpful for you. You can use it whether you're in that urban setting, you're in suburbia, or as we do, we use it along even though we have some open ground. We find it to be a very efficient and handy way to do much of our gardening. I hope you enjoy it. If you did enjoy it, there's also an additional video you'll want to look up in our video library pertaining to the square foot gardening method as popularized by Mel Bartholomew, who wrote the all-new Square Foot Gardening. Look that video up, and I'll walk step-by-step through the principles and how you can make use of this very popular and effective gardening method. If you like this video, make sure to like it, pass it on to your friends, and subscribe to our channel. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.