How to Start Seeds, Transplant, and Fertilize a Raised Bed

What's up everyone. Welcome back to the channel. We are doing a video today on how to start, grow and transplant seedlings into a raised bed garden, as well as fertilize that bed with some organic fertilizer. So here all I'm doing is I'm just compacting some soil into a seed tray with some inserts and I'm patting it down. I want to make sure I have some nice and tight plugs. So once I've done that, I just need to make sure that I pop the soil out of the bottom of this tray because you know, there are holes at the bottom of those inserts. I don't want all that soil at the bottom to take on some water. So I'm just popping that soil out and we're going to do some greens here. So I'm doing kale. This is red Russian kale. And when you're planting these, you want to make sure that you do two to three, maybe four seeds per hole, just to ensure that you get 100% germination rates per hole. So sometimes you're going to get a plant that's just not going to pop up. Well, that's fine. You've got two to three other seeds that can also come out of that same hole. And then you can thin those out to the strongest seedling once they all come up. So I believe now I'm putting in Canton Pack Choy, great little Asian green, high producer. And then finally, I believe this is either spinach or kale, another type of kale. So here, now that I'm done seeding, I'm just planting some extra soil on top and I'm going to compress this once more with my little cardboard. There we go. And that's just to make sure that I get a nice tight plug when I can pull it out. So just knocking that soil out one more time. We're going to bring it over to the watering station and give it a quick drink. And once we're done with this, all we need to do is pop on a humidity dome, put a seedling heat mat below it, which you can grab in the description if you want to. Pop that humidity open a little bit and wait about three days. There we go. We've got seedlings. You can see in some of those inserts that there are quite a few, uh, seeds coming up. So that is exactly what we want. We're going to give it one more drink, not only because they need it, but because when you pop the inserts out, it's a lot easier if they're moist. And now we're going to talk about GardenMaker Naturals. So I've got a ton of fertilizer. It's all organic. You can even customize your own if you want, although I just went with their pre-mixed solutions. And you can see here, there's alfalfa meal, phosphorus, wheat middlings, all this stuff is completely organic. It is really cool. Comes with instructions on how to plant it all, depending on what you're doing. So this is a peek at the 5-5-5 All Purpose. You know, it doesn't really look like much of anything. It's just a bunch of ground up solid material. And when you're doing this, you want to make sure that you broadcast it nice and evenly so you can work into the soil. So the recipe here was a half cup for about 10 square foot of planting space. I got 20, about 20 square feet there. So I put about a cup in, just worked it in, got a nice little bit of dust blown on my face, but it's all good. Just smooth the soil out. And now I'm getting ready to transplant. So when you're transplanting, at least what I like to do is I dig a little depression and I pop it out from the bottom with my finger and just grab as much of that soil as I can and set them all in there. So what I like to do is I like to set every single one up and then I go through and I cover them up. I give them some water, et cetera. And one interesting thing that I wanted to do here is I've noticed that at least in my garden, I get a lot of problems with those caterpillars on my pak choy. They really like to eat that up. So instead of planting, let's say 12 pak choy in a row, 12 spinach and then 12 kale, I like to do it and I like to mix it up a little bit. So I'll do a pak choy, a kale, a spinach, a pak choy, a kale, a spinach, on and on and on. So that if one of those plants gets infested, it's somewhat isolated from the rest of them. Instead of just sort of making a mini monocrop in this raised bed. If that makes any sense. So that's just my little technique. I would love to know what you guys think. If you have a technique for making sure that you isolate your plants from pests, then definitely leave it in the comments below. That'd be super helpful. But here I am just finishing it up. There's that last little guy going in there and now I'm just smoothing everything out. So this is really the final steps. We've got that nice organic fertilizer in there that takes a while to break down. So it's a slow release. And over the course of these greens lives, they're going to have access to some really good stuff. So if you guys want to try this out, definitely give a shout to Garden Maker Naturals. They're super active on social media, really friendly people. And their products so far, I've used it on citrus trees. I've used it on a bunch of different stuff and I really, really enjoy it. But I hope that was helpful. Here I am just kind of straightening some of these out, making sure that the water didn't blast them. But hit a like, hit subscribe, and I will see you on the next video, everyone. Thanks for listening.