How to Fill a Raised Bed and Save 60%+ on Soil Costs

If you have super tall raised beds in your garden like this one or just a lot of raised beds, then it can get pretty expensive to fill it with the perfect raised bed mix. Until now. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb, but on a budget. When I first started gardening back in 2010, I mentored under none other than Mel Bartholomew of Square Foot Gardening. This is the best selling gardening book of all time and I was lucky enough to work directly with him for about 18 months or so. Now one of the things he always touted in his Square Foot Gardening method was Mel's mix. It was one third peat moss, one third vermiculite and one third blended sources of compost. Now I can't lie. It was an extremely powerful and potent mix, but it was also very expensive and he also recommended raised beds that were about six inches tall. As you can see, this one is not six inches tall. This bed here is 30 inches tall and the shortest bed in my garden is 15 inches tall. Now I like it. I'm six foot four. I want to be able to stand and actually work in the bed. So if I'm standing I can just kind of hang out and garden while I'm standing up. But if I filled this whole thing with Mel's mix, with a bunch of bags of mix, it would be so freaking expensive. So I'm stealing two concepts. One, Hugelkultur. It's a German concept and then also a modification of Hugelkultur from my friend Mark over at Self Sufficient Me over in Australia. So hello to Mark. Go check his channel out. But before we get into the method, cultivate that like button if you would like epic fertile soil and let's get into the video. So the trick of this method to half the cost of your soil or more depending on how you do it, is to understand how a lot of plants root systems grow. Most of them aren't getting too much further than 12 to 18 inches down. At least many of these annual vegetables that you and I like to grow in our gardens. And so in a 30 inch bed like this one, that's probably about there or so, which means what am I doing down here? What am I going to fill this up with? Well, if you use this method, you're going to fill it up with organic matter, but it doesn't have to be optimal. It can be logs, brush, sticks, twigs, grass clippings, unfinished partially finished compost. I've thrown in a bunch of vegetable trimmings. There's a ton of things you can do. So what I'll show you is kind of the inside. Now what we're doing is we're basically cutting our soil cost in half or more. I might even fill up to about the 60% mark here. And then from here we just pretend that this is the new bottom. So if about 50 or 60% of this bed is now organic fill material, then what are we using right here? It's a great question. You can go cheap or you can go pretty expensive here. So you could go something like Mel's Mix, which again, that'd be one third vermiculite, one third peat moss and one third, about four or five sources of blended compost. That's probably your highest end option. You could also do something like my friend Joe Lample's recipe, which is 50% topsoil, 25% compost, 25% other sources of organic matter, horse manure, cow manure, things like that. You could, like I'm going to do in this video, go with a bagged mix. I'm going to use Espoma Organics Raised Bed Mix on the top right here. And sometimes I'd like to use a bagged mix just because that's more accessible to many of you watching this video rather than saying, Oh, you know, just call someone up and have them dump two yards of perfect raised bed mix. A lot of us don't have access to that. So for the purposes of this video, I will be using Espoma Organics Raised Bed Bagged Mix. But let's take a look inside and I'll show you how I fill it up and then fill the top off. So what I've done over the last few days is I've gone ahead and grabbed some fill material. So you can see here's some flowering brassicas. I have a random debris of whatever plant that is. I've got some grass. I have some dirt. I have some germinating seeds in here. Here's some leaves and stuff. And that fills up about six inches or so. So it's not enough. I need to get up to about here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over to my passive compost pile right there and shovel a bunch of that in here. And then we'll top it off once we get to about here or so with the rest of that high quality mix. You know, the beauty of this is that every single scoop you just saw me put in is a scoop that I didn't have to buy. And you can make it even cheaper by putting in the larger wooden products like your logs, your sticks and your twigs. If you're doing a big pruning job in the backyard, some grass clippings, this passively composted pile is going to be absolutely perfect. And we have about, I would say 40% of this left to fill. So before the light gets too low, let's go ahead and do that. Like I said, I'm going to use the Espoma Organic 1.5 cubic foot raised bed mix. It's fantastic. And the beauty is I probably have to use a little bit less than half as many of these bags. So I get to use the rest of it in some other part of my garden and save more money. Please ignore the fact that I just spilled some over the top. Well, we were losing the light, so I figured I would get a cool shot as the sun sets on yet another day. It's full. We have about an inch or two of a lip and you can guess why down in the comments. But if you're an Epic gardener, you know it's because we want a mulch layer on top after we plant this out to have a nice protective layer on top of the high quality mix. But guys, it's really that simple. Like I said, logs, larger volume pieces of organic matter are going to be really nice because they fill up more space at an even lower cost in the bottom. And those are eventually going to break down. They're going to become home for bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, all sorts of different things that eventually will become the soil in your bed. And as you grow in something like this, it's going to sink. It'll maybe sink two, three inches in a year, maybe the first year slightly more. And what you'll do is you'll just top dress with some more compost and mulch over the top of that. So it's really just that easy. And I know I'm going to get questions. So I'm going to say go to the pinned comment in this video and you will see all the information you want to see about some of the math behind how much money you might be able to save and also some information on these raised beds here. So it's really that easy guys. I would love to know if you have a creative method. Drop that in the comments. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.