I FINALLY Have A Raised Bed Garden!

This part of the garden has a major problem and that is that it's actually missing the garden. I've been prepping this area for a very long time now and the day has finally come where I'm going to sketch this out, put the beds in, fill them, and show you exactly the whole process from start to finish. Now there are a couple things that will be changing. First of all, I will be getting rid of this fabric bed here. I just want something more permanent, long-lasting. So this is going to go but I will reuse the soil. And then the up front here is the L bed. That is the only bed that's going to be staying here and it's going to serve as our anchor point. So the next thing we need to do is take our handy clipboard, which is a plank with a binder clip on it, and a measuring tape and we're going to stake this area out and do a rough layout so I know exactly how many beds I need, what size I want them at, and how much soil I need to order. Now I need to figure out the dimensions over here and take a couple quick measurements. First is from that garden bed to the wall, which should be about seven feet. And it is just about seven feet so that's good to know. Then I want to measure the distance from this bed to the wall. And even though I am removing this, I am going to be using it as a reference point so that's fine. 16, actually just about 18 inches, so a foot and a half from the wall. And then now the final one that I need to tie this up is the distance from this bed to the end of the square bed over here. All right, so what I'm going to do is continue the line for that garden bed out at seven feet. Then I'm going to account for this gap here, which is hair over five feet, five and a half feet. The end of the bed is just over nine feet. And then I have a one and a half foot gap right there and it's a four foot bed. And now what's interesting here is that at this point there is just an old garden barrier that just kind of has always existed here. So what I'm going to do next is actually measure the distance of that barrier to the wall. And this will probably be a new reference line, I'm guessing at about eight feet. All right, yeah, it's actually exactly at eight feet on the outer edge here. I don't need to keep this in place, I might remove it. But I'm going to assume that any point on from here is going to be eight foot of space on this side, which actually frees up quite a lot in terms of different size beds. So now the thing to do is measure from this fabric bed to the end, or at least as far as I want to go. Right over here in this pit of despair is the most insane plant that I've ever had to deal with. There's almost zero percent chance I'm going to get rid of it. So I don't really actually want to encroach too deep into this area, but I do want to actually record it. So right there is 24 feet, which is good because there's only one foot left on the tape measure. And then realistically, where I want to stop the garden itself, it's probably going to be, let's say at 18 feet. At this point, I know that that insane plant shouldn't be too bad and it won't get into my beds. So now let's add that to the chart. So we need to go 18 feet from this square bed. So each square is five. So that's five, 10, 15, 16, 17 and a half, because that is a half distance right here. So this is the idealized end of the garden. And then I have another six feet from that point to continue technically working with if I could solve that insane weed. So that's going to be another one, two, three, four, five, six. And I'm going to just call it six and not go any half distance. So right here, this is the area of space that we have to work with, not including that one since we're getting rid of it. This is actually quite a lot of square footage to deal with. So now I'm probably going to transfer this into an Excel sheet so I could play with different shapes and sizes. And we'll go from there. Instead of showing you guys every single measurement out there that probably doesn't make a lot of sense, I have it all recorded right here. And instead, I made a spreadsheet I'll include in the description for you guys, where I made a Google sheet that has every single square the exact same size. So you could pretend like every square is exactly one foot. So now what I'm going to do is draw in the dimensions of the garden. The bound points are the most important kind of things to figure out how many beds you need and where to place everything. So I know, for example, that the garden can only go seven feet out from the wall. So what I'm going to do is draw a solid border line at seven feet. So I know that that is my boundary where I cannot go past. So now I have a line at seven. And the next thing I want to do is enter the anchor point. So I measure that L-shaped bed. It's the only bed that's going to be staying there and is already there. So it's a perfect reference point to base the rest of the garden off of. What I'm going to do is select a five column cell and change that to the color green. That bed is five feet by five feet on the L-shaped actual dimensions. So that is why I'm going to make it five by five. And just shading the cells in green like this is a perfect way of representing the bed. The next one is going to be very close to it up against the wall. Now I wouldn't recommend generally ever putting a bed up against the wall, but in this case I know I could handle it. They're short beds, they're not that big. So it's easy for me to work around them and access them. And that's why I'm going with it. But every other bed that I'm going to be putting in is going to be two feet apart from the next bed and two feet away from the wall behind it. So that way there's easy access across the entire bed from any point. So these are the first two beds. The one that I'm putting in here I've already decided is a four by three by 15 inch. So it's going to be the shorter beds. And now I'm gonna, like I said, go two feet away from that bed, two feet away from the wall. And that is going to be where I put my next bed which will be a four by four 30 inch tall bed. I want a tall bed, actually I want two tall beds because we're going to be running a little experiment in them. So they have to be the same and I want them both to be tall. So they're going to be four by four by 30. And you'll see that experiment in a moment here when we set up the actual beds. And after that the last bed that I'm going to fit in for now is a four by eight bed. This will be a nice big bed. I'm going to keep it short at 15 inches so I can plant stuff like tomatoes in it and make it easy to trellis up. And there we go. So now I have all my beds in. I'm going to label them very quickly. So the way I did this whole design is I went to the Epic Gardening website and then I clicked on products and went to Birdies Metal Raised Beds. And that is where I viewed through all the different options we have. And I decided that I'm going to be using original 6-in-1s, tall 8-in-1s, and an original 8-in-1. So the original 6-in-1 configuration is going to be configuration 1. So if I scroll down you'll see all the possible layouts. You could click through them see what the size is and how much soil they take and what parts you use. But I'm going with one which is roughly in that four by three range that I talked about. And the soil volume is 15. So now what I'm going to do is go through add in all the soil volumes for each bed. The tall 8-in-1 in a square configuration takes 44. So that's a pretty hefty amount of soil. So 44, another 44, and then the original 8-in-1 in the 4x8 configuration is roughly 30. So I already did this math and I know that it's exactly 133 cubic feet. Now 133 cubic feet is useful but usually when you order bulk soil it's by the yard. So what I'm going to do is divide that by 27 and that'll tell me exactly how many yards of soil I need which is 4.9 or let's say 5 cubic yards. Now I like to order a little extra soil something like 6 cubic yards will probably be ideal. That'll give me some extra soil to fill grow bags, give me extra soil to top off beds like this herb bed that's settled quite a bit. And that's about it. If you need to find a bulk soil supplier call your local nursery ask them if they have any leads. They might even sell bulk soil or there might be some private company that delivers bulk soil to your area. So we know the beds we need. I already built them. I just went ahead and assembled them beforehand. Now all we need to do is go out there in the garden, lay them all out, get our soil in, get our irrigation in, and show you how I actually mend the soil because raised bed soil can be a little bit tricky. I like to give my plants the best possible option. So let's go over to the garden and set this entire thing up. So I have Paul here helping me out because we do have a lot of soil to move and he likes to dig so we should be good for that. Now we are starting back here on the L-shaped bed and the reason for that is that this bed is already in place. So it's an anchor point to build out the rest of this garden. It makes the most sense to start from a permanent position rather than start from over there to try to perfectly meet this side. The other thing is that we are going to be moving all that soil out of that bed anyway so we might as well work our way down. Now over here we do have a slope. What we are going to do here is just kind of cut in the side of the hill here, level the bed out. It's going to drop down a little bit and create a little bit of a drop then lift to the tall beds all the way down. All right now that we have this perfectly leveled we are going to transfer all the soil out of this bed into here and then whatever's left over we'll put into the next bed. But first I got to pull out all these artichokes and take a look at the root system on these perennial artichokes. So this is something I could definitely transplant somewhere else and will regrow so I might as well save them because they are quite mature plants. All right so we're getting pretty close to filling that and I did just re-level it with the soil and I think it actually does look better. This back side might be a little bit low but we'll figure it out. We got most of the soil out of here so I think what I'd like to do is just try to drag this bed out, get it out of the way, place the new birdies bed in its place and then we'll backfill it to get this out of the way. This has been in the garden for over a year now. Zero damage. The roots did not really make it through. The liner has held up so honestly not a bad bed. I just wanted something permanent so we're going with the birdies. So now all the beds are in. The next thing we need to do is actually drop in the PVC pipe and actually pipe into the beds. Before filling it with soil it's going to be much easier for you to get all this irrigation installed and also I still haven't got a call from that soil delivery so I might as well get some irrigation in. The first thing I'm doing here is cutting off the line that I set up on my irrigation. So I am going to adapt it all to half inch PVC, not because of any particular reason except that I just happen to have a lot left over half inch PVC. So every connection is going to get primed then it's going to get glued and we'll work our way through over to the raised beds. We're nearing the end of the day and we're definitely not even close to done here but we do have the irrigation done. So this obviously took longer than I expected as it always does. So if you come look over here the general strategy for every single one of these beds is first of all I'm running the irrigation line up against the wall here very shallow. It's never going to be pressurized all the time only pressurized when the irrigation is running so I'm not worried about leaks or anything like that. Now the reason why I'm coming in from the corner like this is that what happens is I have to deal with the curve of this bed a little bit. So I want to come in from the top elbow and then I'll run my poly line here pull a manifold that will run drip lines all the way down to the end of the bed. It's day two and we're going to finish filling up all these beds but I forgot to mention the experiment that I'm going to be running. These are both the exact same beds four by four 30 inches high. This bed over here is going to be filled with soil from the start and only soil. This one I'm going to do using a semi hugelkultur method and fill the base with logs. Now the idea behind putting logs in the bottom of your bed is that you use less soil. Personally I think it's not really worth it when you can order soil in bulk. You're already saving so much money by ordering it this way but there are some other advantages of adding logs to your bed. One of which is that as they decay they will form a sort of fungal network. So I have an old piece of wood here and this is one that's just been aging for a while and all this white stuff in there is basically just fungal networks. So eventually they will sort of decompose get kind of spongy retain some water and probably add some fungal life. So there might be some net positive to that but in exchange this bed will settle a lot as that wood breaks down. So there's a trade-off to everything. I personally think that I like this method more but now I finally get the chance to test it with two identical beds. So I'm gonna add the rest of these logs down here and we're gonna go fill up these beds and mulch this entire garden. So I ordered soil from a local place called San Pascual Valley Soils. The cost of this raised bed mix $44 a cubic yard. The delivery was the most expensive part it was $200 about. So I got six yards. If I add the cost of delivery each yard is roughly $70. What that means basically just to not try to overwhelm you with math is that I'm paying anywhere from two to four dollars to an equivalent bag of soil you would buy at the store. So this is by far cheaper than anything you could possibly get and the quality is much better. Now when it comes to actually moving the soil from here back into my yard we're using a combination of gorilla carts and wheelbarrows and one of the best tools is actually a manure or hay fork. You could get into anywhere on the pile like this it won't really drop much then you move it over and place it in. Another great tool that I like to use is a snow shovel. Now obviously in San Diego it doesn't snow but I do order a lot of soil. The nice thing about this is that you could come in low at the base of your pile like that and you get a pretty good scoop every single time. It just doesn't work well when you get up here. It's actually that worked pretty well but in general it's a little bit better to use the fork up there and the shovel at the base. Now we got to finish filling these beds. I'm gonna load up this cart and we'll get back to filling. As discussed we did add some more logs and woodchips so this is now a very properly weighed bed. Luckily it's very deep so we're not going to run into any issues with burying wood in the soil but if you do this you want to make sure you get a hose and you sort of blast through all this material and what this does is it helps the soil settle down into all the little cracks and holes that you created by laying out all these logs and woodchips. So as we fill this with soil I'm going to periodically come through go like this and make sure that that soil is actually working its way down to the base of the bed. Before we finish actually topping these beds off I will choose to amend it. This is optional depending on the soil you're getting and just your personal preference. I know for a fact that the manufacturer of this raised bed soil tells you that there is basically no nitrogen present in the soil. That's maybe a little bit weird sounding but totally fine if you know that up front. So what they recommend is that you use something like a feather meal for a quick release of nitrogen for whatever you're planting but I will be doing that but first before I do that I'm going to amend the bulk of the soil with an organic slow release fertilizer like this Espoma Plantone. This is 5-3-3 so quite a balanced mix and all I'm going to do is just take a pretty decent shovel full here and just spread it across the top. So that's going to be amendment number one. I'm going to just try to get a good coverage across the entire bed over here as well under this bag. So that's the first step. The next thing I'm going to be adding is volcanic rock dust. It's also normally called azomite. Basically it's just a very finely pulverized volcanic mineral. So as you can see it has this kind of almost pinkish tone to it and this is going to contain a little bit of macronutrients but mostly micronutrients. All these little elements that plants need to thrive is going to be in here. So for example if you're growing beets you can't grow beets without boron. This will have some boron present. Not to just get too complicated about it but the main reason I actually grow this is that I want to make sure that all of my plants have access to all the minerals that they could possibly need because what that means is that those minerals will get into your vegetables and produce and improve your overall health of your plants. Not only the overall health of your plants but you'll now also be consuming some of these minerals and elements that otherwise might be missing from your vegetables. So that's the reason why I always like to put this across my entire garden but definitely in a raised bed that's not actually part of the earth and has a bunch of minerals. The last thing I'm going to add is actually some extra pumice. Pumice adds aeration and drainage and when you have a tall 30 inch bed like this it just gets a little bit trickier to make sure that you have good water flow all the way to the bottom that you have enough oxygen. So every single one of these beds I'm going to be adding a half bag of pumice and the reason I went with pumice over perlite is that pumice is a little bit heavier. It will actually stay in the soil whereas something like a perlite will actually just rise to the top every time you water. It can be really frustrating so I like to go with pumice for that reason and also the reason that it doesn't have a bunch of cancerous dust that you have to breathe. So another great reason. What we're going to do now that I have the base amendments in is take a power planter like this and just basically mix it in as much as I can. This is just to make sure that I have a good mix of these minerals and amendments throughout the entire soil column and then we'll come back top it off and I'll add one more amendment. It'll guarantee everything grows well. Just do a little bit more manual mixing here to make sure that everything is distributed well and we'll go ahead and top it off. Before we finish amending the rest of the beds we have to finish this one and the final ingredient that we're putting is feather meal. This is an organic high nitrogen quick release sort of fertilizer so 12-0-0 and based on the application rates it says that I need about two cups for this size bed. So I have this outdoor measuring cup. Don't worry this isn't the one that I use for cooking. That's two cups and the idea behind this is that this fast release of nitrogen will make sure that whatever I plant in here won't be stunted by lack of nitrogen because as I said this soil is known to not have any nitrogen present. So this will guarantee that that first crop does really well and all the other like slow release fertilizer we added earlier will guarantee that the future plants and also the roots as they go down can also get access to that nitrogen as they continue to grow. So I'm just going to lightly scratch it into the surface without trying to mix it too much because I don't want to actually disturb the distribution and that's it. This bed I will probably give at least two to three days just to allow the soil to settle a little bit before topping it off and then planting in it. Even when you are using pure soil like this the soil will tend to settle a little bit and you don't want to plant into it right away because the plants are just not going to be happy if their roots settle by a couple inches after you just put them in. The other factor that you should always check is to make sure that your soil isn't physically hot. This soil is kind of hot because it is actually made out of a cow manure so that breakdown process just produces a lot of heat similar to compost. So make sure it's not hot and allow at least two to three days for the soil to settle before you plant into it. So I'm gonna mix this in and we'll get the rest of the beds amended and we'll talk about the next step. All the beds have been amended and right now I'm just flushing these irrigation lines to make sure that there's no sediment trapped in them. This ensures that when I install the drip irrigation it's basically not going to all get clogged immediately. So now what we need to do is add the mulch to the rest of this area and then I'll tell you exactly how I plan to use every single one of these beds. The first layer of mulch is now down. I got everything wet so that all the dust has settled and everything is just looking so good. I'm so excited to see this build come together. This first bed, the lower one, is definitely going to be growing tomatoes in the springtime but right now I'm probably going to fill it with cauliflower and broccoli just to get that soil started with something. These tall beds are going to be a lot of fun just because I like the idea of having experiments in the garden. This is the one that has a lot of wood chips and logs, the more hugelkultur style, and this one is straight soil. I'd love to hear you guys' predictions on which one you think will do better. I am not entirely sure which one I'm going to end up liking more. Now there is that tiny bed in the back. I'm thinking I'll probably put at least a few flowers in here just to help bring a little bit more pollinator action to this back section but that's it. The soil is still about 120 degrees so it's too hot to plant it now. It's because it has a lot of manure compost blended in so I'm going to give it about a week for the temps to drop, the soil to settle, and I might do a little top off layer and then I'm really going to get planted in here. I can't wait to see how much food I can get out of this new area. Thanks for watching, I'll see you guys next time.