How to Bring a Dead Garden Back to Life

If you've been gardening for the last couple of years and you have some beds that maybe you've neglected, in this video, I'm going to show you how to reset, replant and replan out beds for the season. So grab your favorite garden helper and let's get into the video. So the first thing you want to do when you are relooking at a garden space that maybe you neglected a little bit or let go a little too long, is just looking at the quality of the soil. So yeah, I mean, let's take our irrigation out and we'll talk about that at some point here on the channel, but that's not the point of this video. So you just want to get your irrigation out of the way if you have it. Let's reset that. And what you're really looking for at the start is, think about it, if you've left your bed to basically do nothing, and especially if it's been uncovered, you want to make sure that the soil or the raised bed mix is still at least okay. Yeah. Especially things like moisture and then like some of the fertility things they want to deal with. Yeah. So I mean really what I'm just going to do is take a quick look. And obviously I've, Oh, I found something I don't like. And I'm going to touch it with my bare hands. One of these grubs, one of these gross grubs. And so this is something that it's actually important to scan for because if I plant directly into this bed, knowing that I have these absolutely disgusting creatures in here, what these guys do. So a lot of these will eat your roots and specifically they'll eat your new seedling roots and they'll just stunt your plant. You'll be wondering, why is my plant dying? It's just sitting there. Oftentimes it's grubs. If we're talking about not, uh, you know, getting discouraged and having a garden bed that gets reset, it really is about this. Make sure there's moisture in there. Make sure there's no soil borne pests. We just went grub hunting. Babka helped out a little bit. You do not want to see what's in here. It's actually quite gross. Babka is disgusted. But anyways, we've got the grubs out, which certainly might not be a problem in your area. It is for us. We've troubleshot the soil. Now we want to do some very basic amendments. So we've got a couple of things here. I'll go over this one. This is just Espoma's Garden Tone. This is an organic granular fertilizer. I love using organics simply because you kind of can't over fertilize. It's definitely harder to. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is a slow release. It's going to break down over time. And so I'm not stressed about the exact amount I'm applying here. It's not a huge deal. And then you've got something. Yeah, this is a Warm Gold. It's a mix of worm castings with things like azomite and kelp. So the kelp is nice cause it's like a biostimulant, which just means that plants like it. And then the worm castings are of course, a nice little mix of nutrients, but nothing like too heavy. Nothing too crazy. And the soil we already know is okay. It's decent. And this is a good time if you're going to do some amending to also rehydrate the soil. So what I like to do is, is mix it in just a little bit. And then Jacques will grab the hose here. And especially if it's extremely dry, what you kind of want to do, especially if you're using like a raised bag mix that might have a little bit of peat in it. Peat can sometimes be very hard to rehydrate, especially if you've let a bed go. What you want to do is kind of come through, pop it on and just break the surface a little bit and just work it in. Cause it'll take a while to rehydrate. Oftentimes you need to water way more than you think to get a bed wet initially. Sometimes it feels like it's actually getting watered, but then as soon as you scratch the surface, it's dry. It's completely dry. And so this is something we've both talked about as another one is you can also do the water in quick passes, come back to it, water in another pass. Eventually it'll permeate down. You can just do that while you're working on other things in the garden. Totally. Yeah. So I'm just going to try to work some of this in here. I see some earthworms in. I'm actually pretty excited about the quality of this soil. There's some earthworms in here. There's a bunch of them. But the whole point of what we're getting at in this part of the reset is just troubleshooting the only thing that's really going to feed your plants, which is the soil and the life within the soil. So let's smooth this out here, Jacques. And then we'll get it reset and we'll start planting out. The last thing before we get to planting is if you've got a fully prepped bed, well, it's actually a really great time if you want to install some kind of irrigation system to go ahead and do that. Of course, we already have one installed on this bed, which we'll get into, like I said, in another video, but also a trellis or something like that. If you know you're going to plant cucumbers or tomatoes or some sort of thing that needs some support, well it's a great time to actually just get that in and then plant around it so that the plants can grow into it. Yeah, it's a lot easier, I can say from personal experience to install irrigation in an empty bed rather than one full of plants. We installed this one and then we installed it into the radish bed, which we're going to next. And this was a bit of a nightmare. So we didn't want to disturb the radishes. So here we are in the radish bed here that actually Jacques, you sowed this. And why don't you explain the reason why you sowed it? So I sowed the radishes because they just grow so fast that I wanted something quick so that the soil had some life in it. Yeah. So we didn't quite know what we were going to put in. And it was a weird shoulder season. It was kind of winter-ish, spring-ish. And so radishes work perfectly because they'll basically get you through a season like that where you want to get to spring and radishes grow in about 35 days. And so if you have a month left before your classic spring, it's a great time to put in something like this. But these need to come out now. And I would say Jacques, it made total sense what you did. But what we're seeing now is the fruits of that labor. And these fruits might be a little bit too, too juicy. Too many fruits. Yeah. Because we're going to pull out, I would say at least a hundred radishes here. I will say that when it comes to radishes, these white kind of Hakurai is one variety that I know of, are the only ones that I actually like eating. They're like sweet and juicy. They don't have like that very sharp radish flavor. So when it comes to planning your beds out, this is kind of a little trick you can do where you want to make a list of, it has a huge pole right there. That's a, that's beautiful. That's like ready to go to market. But you can make a list of some quicker growing crops, radishes, turnips, beets, things like that that will get you through to the season that you're actually trying to plant in, like spring. And so what we're doing now is just pulling these out. And you know, what we would do differently this time is plant them on succession, which we're going to do with some beans in this bed over here. But also plant, if you're going to set an irrigation system up, you probably want to plant it along the irrigation lines and not crossing the irrigation lines. Although this did perfectly fine. Yeah, it ended up working. That's a really great thing about irrigation is that when you install things like drip tape or just drip tubing, the nice thing is that it gives you a grid to plant off of. You could do spacing off the emitters. You could kind of have lines to plant into. Yeah. It just makes life a lot easier. Yeah. I mean these, these emitters, for example, are on six inches. If we had a plant like lettuce that we wanted to plant every six, you just put it right next to the emitter and you're in a good spot. So we're basically where we were with the other bed. So we're going to snap our fingers here, reset this real quick, and then plant it out. And there you go. We have amended it. Actually no grubs in this one. So now I want to show you a technique for planting a bed that avoids the radish problem we just ran into. So Jacques, I'm going to plant these beans out. Let's grab some bean seedlings and get into this. It's just a succession sowing technique. So here's how to think about this. I want beans, but I don't want the beans all at the same time, like I had the radishes. I'd rather have them kind of spread out throughout the spring and the summer. So I've got Roc d'Or bush bean. Hopefully I pronounced that right. And I also have Contender. Contender is a contender. It is a fantastic bush bean. You can direct sow half of a bed, and then just plant in with either transplants that you've started yourself or, you know what, it's not a crime to go to the nursery and get some seedlings if it's going to make your gardening a little bit easier. So I'm just going to come in about an inch deep on these beans and I'm just planting them on each emitter here, but maybe four to six inch spacing is totally fine. And the reason I'm starting in this corner is because my sun pattern is coming from over there and it's ending right about here. So this section is going to have more sun. If I planted all the transplants here and then the seedlings over here, it would block them a little bit. So I'm going to put my transplants over here. So all I'm just going to do now is come in and drop in as many bean seeds as I've got left in these packs. And then we'll supplement the rest with the direct transplanting. When you are direct sowing bean seeds and not soaking them like I just didn't soak, then you do want to make sure you hydrate that soil because it has to get through that seed hole before it's going to germinate. So as long as temps are good in your area, then you can do this and just make sure that you get this nice and moist. And while we're waiting on those bean seedlings, I'll show you the final step to prepping a bed and making sure that you don't have to waste water when you're actually caring for these plants. So the final step is to add some kind of mulch. And that is really what's not only going to protect the soil, but protect the plants, the plant roots, all of that stuff. And if you have drip, it also covers the drip and makes it last a little bit longer as well. So I'm using a shredded straw mulch. This is garden straw, which is far and away the best straw mulch I've ever used. We actually carry it in our store, but you can use microbark. You could use wood chips if you want. I find for a raised bed, you probably want to use a more fine mulch than something like wood chips. Maybe if you have a garden bed with ornamentals, use something like wood chips. But for a raised bed, I think a more fine one works. You can even use fresh compost. You can use grass clippings, whatever you have lying around. I just like the reflectivity of the straw mulch. It really helps keep the heat off of the surface of the soil. And I live in a pretty hot climate. So it's important for me to make sure that I get this as cool as I can. I'm going about two inches or so. You can go about two or three inches. It's all you really need. And once we get our bean seedlings going, we'll put the rest in this other side of the bed. All right, we have our succession sown beans. These will come up. These are going to grow much faster. Let's swap on over here and talk about some other stuff you can plant this spring. So we're in our final bed that we're going to rehab at least for this video and kind of show you how to get things back in order for the season. And this really just is a classic cannot go wrong combination. Of tomatoes, basil and actually alyssum, which is a pick that I learned from you Jacques last year as an interplant. There's actually a lot of different plants that work well interplanting with tomatoes, which we'll do a full video on pretty soon. There's some really counterintuitive ones like cucumbers work really well. So I don't think you've seen that much, but we'll do that in a separate video. In this one, just showing you a basic layout here. Now the thing to remember is these are determinate tomatoes. Yep. So determinate tomatoes means that they're determined to grow to a certain point and stop basically. It really means that their height is determined and their terminal bud is a flower bud, which means that it cannot produce any more leafy growth. That's the end. With raised beds, especially raised beds that are this tall, this is about 30 inches tall. It's our tall six in one model. If you're growing it indeterminate, I mean, I'm a tall guy. I'm not really looking to grow an eight foot tall tomato in this bed. So you want to grow determinate. And let's just talk about spacing real quick. It's roughly 18 inches to 24 inches. 18 inches is like a safe minimum. Yeah. Especially for determinants, you're totally safe to do that. So what we're doing here is, and everyone's got their way of planting tomatoes. In my personal opinion, I think a lot of people overcomplicate. Bury an egg, bury a fish. You can definitely do that. I'm not saying you can't, but also I'm just saying, it's a tomato. It's a pretty vigorous plant. You kind of can't go wrong unless you just bury it really high. The one thing I like to do is bury them deep. So you can see what Jacques is doing here. Kind of want to excavate a decent chunk of soil. And for determinants, it's, I guess, a little less important to go deep, just because they have that determined height. Yeah. But at some point you could slow them down a little. I mean, not like, you should still bury them deep, but you don't have to worry about it as much. Yeah. You can see what I did on mine, Jacques, is I went a little lower. Actually, this is great. I pruned off. Yeah, yeah. So we have a little comparison here, but honestly, your tomato will produce either way. I wouldn't really stress about this too much. So let's get the other two in. These varieties, if you're curious, we have Roma tomatoes in the front, two Romas and then two Celebrity tomatoes. So when you're growing, another thing that as a gardener you learn over time is respecting variety and making sure you're growing varieties that work for your zone instead of just whatever looks cool on the internet, because that is a path to getting discouraged. I've done it before. Yeah. So have I. I mean, you grow something that you think is really interesting and it turns out it doesn't grow well and then it dies and then you get very sad and maybe you give up on gardening and that's not what we want, right? So these guys go in. The cool thing too about determinants is that they'll tend to set all their fruit at a similar time. So it's fantastic for doing like tomato sauces, salsas where you want like a nice big batch of something. This is the tomato you really want to grow. Yep. Good point. Okay. Why don't you share a little bit about Alyssum because you have a little more experience there. I'm going to go up front with the Alyssum. It tends to grow kind of short and bushy, but all these little flowers are great for attracting the brackenid wasp, which is a kind of wasp that parasitizes tomato hornworms. They also just smell really nice and they look really nice. So I just like growing them for that reason alone. So I'm taking and we're doing a very classic tomato interplant here with basil, but Genovese basil. So almost the most classic one. This is some basil that we started a little bit ago. Now starting seeds, of course, we've done a bunch of videos on, but basil can be a little more of a challenging start. It tends to be a slower germinator. And I mean, this basil here is probably 20-ish days old. Yeah. And so it's not looking big, but then I think you guys know that once you get basil going, it really starts going. You could even put things like onions in here. There's some very classic combinations, pizza garden style, but this one's going to work really well for us. It's just a good way to get back in. Like put something in, you know you're going to love. I'm for sure going to love making sauces and slicing tomatoes. So I know this is going to be a success for me this year. Where do you want to put this last guy in? Let's pop them right there. Perfect. So spacing wise, we threw tomato in four and then we threw a row of basil through the middle. And if we had another Alyssum, we actually could probably put one right there too. But we might start some seeds and do that. So the only thing left to do now is just mulch and water. That's really all there is to it, guys. It is getting back out in the garden, getting excited about it again, amending your bed, fixing it up, planning on succession, making sure you don't have everything all at once. So it's really overwhelming. And then just planning some classic stuff that you actually love and are excited to grow. So that's it. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.