Helping You Choose The Best Raised Bed Vegetable Garden Set Up.

I have been meaning to make this video for so long, so if you've been thinking about starting a raised bed garden, especially here in nice hot Florida, you are in the right place because we're going to go over all the things that you need to consider. So the first thing that you need to consider when you're going to get into raised beds is what kind of raised bed. So there's like three traditional kinds. So one is going to be this one right here, which is a galvanized steel raised bed. Then there is wood. You can use cedar or just pressure treated wood. Then there is cinder blocks. Those are probably the three most popular, and I did figure out the prices for you just in general using Home Depot numbers. The cinder blocks, you're going to need 32, so 16, and you need two layers of them to make an eight by four foot bed. Each cinder block is about $2.30, and so that brings you to somewhere around $76, plus the labor, whether you pay somebody or whether you are trucking back all of these heavy cinder blocks. Second one is going to be wood. I strongly recommend if you're going to be growing in wood, especially here in Florida, that you have to use pressure treated wood. Even cedar, which is very good at not breaking down too quickly, will break down here in Florida, just the rain and the sun and everything. I mean, you get usually like a year out of them and that is it. So that's something to consider, but pressure treated, you're going to get a few more years out of that. Pressure treated wood right now, when I checked it, it's about $4.50 every two by four, and you're going to need about nine depending on how you want to stack them because you do need them to be at least 12 inches high. So if you want to stack them thicker, if you want to stack them on their side and a little bit thinner, it will depend. So that kind of gets you around $40. And then this one right here, the galvanized steel beds, they come in lots of shape sizes and manufacturers. I get this one off of Amazon. I'll put it down below. I've been using it the entire time I've been here. I think it's like six years now. And they have held up really well. There's no rusting in the corners. It looks pretty much brand new. Now these guys normally go for like $60 a bed, but there's always sales. And at the time of filming it right now, they were $27.99, so $28. And then they also have deals where if you buy more of them, you get less. So cost is always a pretty good factor, but lifespan is even more important. The cinder blocks are probably going to last the longest. The galvanized steel is going to last a pretty good amount of time too. It will start to rust and the coating on the outside, which I believe is made of zinc, will start to break down a little bit. And then wood, especially here in Florida, is not going to last long. Even pressure treated wood, you're probably looking about three or four years and then you're having to pull it out and put it back in, which is a pain. I'll just tell you that right now. Very painful. Something else that you want to consider when you're picking out your bed is what you're going to put on the bottom. I don't have a lot of critters here, but some people get voles and moles and all kinds of things that dig up underneath the ground. So you're going to need to get hardware cloth or something or the mesh hardware mesh and put that on the bottom of the bed. Mine are actually open to the ground. So mine is just cardboard that got put down there to kill the grass and then nothing is underneath it. Speaking of the cardboard, you do want to deal with grass removal in some way. It depends on the kind of grass you have. So I have St. Augustine grass and it does vine and such, but just putting down like three or four layers of cardboard was enough to smother the grass once I filled up the bed. But if you have like Bermuda or Torpedo, you might want to lay down some sort of plastic or some sort of like a weed barrier down underneath. Maybe you even want to spray underneath. I know it sounds horrible, but those grasses are really, really bad. And before you know it, you'll fill your whole bed and then you'll have nothing but grass in here and it is like impossible to get out. The last really important thing you got to think about is like size and shape. You at least want 12 inches. 18 is better. I wish I had gotten 24 because I'm kind of getting sick of bending over. I'm getting a little bit older. It's bothering my back. But if that's not a concern for you, you just need 12 inches for your plants. Even like the really deep-rooted plants, as long as they can go underneath or they can kind of spread a little bit farther, they'll be absolutely fine. And then in terms of size and shape, 4x4, 8x4, 6x3, whatever. All of those are really up to your preferences. It's really about how much you can fit in your space. And you always want to make sure that you have walkways in between your beds. I made this mistake on the beds over by my pool cage and I put them right up against the pool cage with no walkway on the other side. And boy, has that been such a nightmare. I will never do that again. Learn from me. Don't do that. It is so bad anytime we have to maintenance those screens or get into the back of the beds. Pain in the butt. The next thing that you have to think about once you get your beds is where you're going to actually place them. That can be east to west, which is this right here. Or right behind me, these are north to south. Some people are going to tell you that east to west is better. Some people are going to say north to south is better. You know, I think the only... I've got both, so I honestly don't really notice a difference. I think the biggest difference is when you have something like this, when you have an arch trellis and you have plants that you want to grow underneath on the arch trellis, those, it can make a bit of a difference. Because once the plants fully like engulf the entire arch trellis, any plants underneath, which this isn't the ideal way of doing it, right? You want a trellis to span over an area where there isn't a garden bed underneath. So what I really should have done is run it from that bed right there to this bed right here. And then the walkway can be where the plants grow over. I think when it comes to an arch trellis, I would probably recommend that they are best grown east to west on north to south beds. That's my personal opinion. I think there would be people that would argue that that isn't the way that they like it. The way that the sun comes up is it rises in the east and it kind of sets into the middle of the sky for the entire day until it sets in the west. So if you're running your beds east to west, the sun is just going to come up and follow the whole bed. When you run them north to south, it comes up on one side and it goes down on the other, which here in Florida is not a big deal. Half day sun is like preferred for us. I think if you were up north, it would matter more and the east to west would probably be better than the north to south. But here in Florida, I kind of prefer the north to south. I guess because of the way that the sun goes, like one half the bed gets full sun for half the day and the other half the bed gets full sun the other half the day. And that works out perfectly because that's the max amount of sunlight we need and the plants can help give each other shade. But it still works east to west as well, especially if you can put some shade on that side. So really think about how or where you can place it to see in your yard where it can get that half day sun. One of the easiest ways to do this is to take pictures of your yard throughout the day. So pick one day that you're going to be home all day and just set your phone on a timer every two hours. Walk out there, take pictures of your yard or the area that you're thinking of and see where the shade is on the ground. Like right now I have like shade right here, but you can kind of see there's like a line right there where you can see the full sun. If you take pictures throughout the day, you're going to see exactly at what point in the morning all the way to the afternoon when those shade spots are going to appear. There's also an app. I haven't used it a tremendous amount, but I have used it a little bit more last winter and I feel like it really helped me. I'll put it down below, but it's basically like a sun placement app. You put your zip code and your address in or your location in and it'll tell you the shade throughout the day for winter and summer, which is equally important because my sun changes dramatically in the winter. Instead of just coming up and over, it actually comes at a slant. So it's more like a slant. So there's a lot of weird places where shade occurs in my garden during the winter. So that's something to think about. So the app might help you if you're making those decisions right now and you don't want to wait until winter to figure out where the shady spots are. The other thing you got to think about when it comes to placement is like your vicinity to like where your watering is, right? So what happened with mine is we have a sprinkler system for the yard and we had our sprinkler company come out because when we bought the house, the sprinklers were all messed up. So they had to lay new ones, but we knew we were putting beds in these areas and we asked them to attach to our new sprinkler system and attach hoses that come up in the center of where the beds were going to be. That was the way that we did it, but you might have to run a hose. So you have to think about where your water is coming from. You might have rain barrels that you're connecting it to. You really don't want to be taking big buckets of water or running hoses across your yard. It just becomes kind of a pain in the butt. So if you can figure out a way to place your gardens in areas that can easily get water added to them, that's going to be the route you want to consider. While we're on the subject of watering, let's talk about the three options that you have for hand watering. This is my favorite one. This is an irrigation system. This specifically is a drip irrigation. It's actually a vortex or drip. It gives an option. There's also one called a micro sprayer, but they all kind of function the same way. They connect to some sort of hosing. For me, that's, oh, I can't lift it up. There's like a, there's a brown hosing that connects to my sprinkler system that I was telling you about earlier. It goes underground and you don't have to do that way. There's other ways that you can connect through hoses or you can have water brought out to the area that you're gardening in. It depends on how big your space is, but you can connect the drip irrigation to that. It's not as complicated as it sounds, believe it or not. It sounds super complicated, but I did it and I did a whole video on that. I'll put that one towards the end in case you're interested in that, plus all the materials that I use. If you don't want to go that far, brand new to gardening, you're just putting your first bed in. Don't go crazy. Don't go all out. You don't need that day one. Two really easy options. The first one's going to be hand watering. Get yourself a bucket. Get yourself a watering can and water it by hand. The rain will help you as well. That's probably like the best way. That's the way I started. That's the way most people start. It works phenomenally. The second way, which is if you get sick of watering like I did, because I don't like carrying these heavy watering things around. So for me, I was trying to find an out as soon as possible. My old garden, I got a soaker hose. If you're not sure what a soaker hose, it looks like a regular hose, but there's like these microscopic tiny little pin pricks all throughout it. So when you turn the water on, it just like leaks water through the whole thing. It looks like a bad hose, but it slowly leaks water kind of like a drip irrigation and that works really great. But just be prepared and know that a soaker hose here in Florida usually lasts like a year or a full season and then they start to really break down and they just spray out crazy amounts of water and they just they break down super fast. I'm sure there are varieties or brands that don't break down as quick, but eventually they all kind of break down and that's why we end up moving to something like a drip irrigation. But a soaker hose is very inexpensive. You can put it attached to a faucet at your house with a timer, which are pretty inexpensive as well. And it's a great way to automate your watering very early on for a small amount cost, because we're just getting started with gardening and you don't even know if you absolutely love it, why invest a huge amount of money in it. Probably the most expensive and time intensive thing that you're going to do when installing a raised bed garden is filling it. I think it would shock you how much soil it needs from the very beginning. So we're going to talk about two different ways you can do it. So there's a fast way to fill beds and then there's a cheap way to fill beds. There is not a fast and cheap way to fill beds. Those are two different things. So let's go through the fast way. The fast way is to find a bulk nursery, a bulk soil providing nursery. I live close to Tampa, so Whitwam Organics has been my go-to for a while now, but there's plenty of them around. And so to fill it fast, I usually use their 50-50 blend. It's 50 percent compost, 50 percent, I believe, topsoil or just regular soil. And the compost adds the nutrients for the soil. They mix it together and then you fill it. So each bed takes about one cubic yard. I always want to say one cubic ton. It's not. Please don't say. One cubic yard. So think of a square that is the size of a yardstick. That is one cubic yard. And that fills up an eight by four foot bed that is one foot tall. If it's two feet tall, it's going to need twice as much. So think of that. There are calculators online that you can use that will help you calculate that if you have different measurements. If it's not eight by four foot by one, if it's six by three by four, you know, there's calculators online that help you be able to calculate how much soil. But for this size bed, one cubic yard. If you wanted to get bags of soil, I did this once. It was crazy, crazy work. First off, like transporting it, moving it, all this stuff. It was awful. And it took, I think it was somewhere between 22 and 27 bags. It was a crazy amount of bags. And imagine if you have more than one one bed to fill up and it's much more expensive. Buying it by the bag is crazy expensive compared to buying it in bulk. Bulk is like the cheapest rate. It's actually really good, especially if you can go get it. If you have to have it delivered, there is a bit of a delivery cost, but overall it's still, with the delivery cost, cheaper than buying bags. But still, this isn't cheap stuff. This is kind of expensive. This is in the hundreds of dollars range. And it's been a couple years since I've done it. So I I think the last time I did it, I got like four cubic yards and it was somewhere around, I think it was like three to four hundred dollars. Now let's talk about the cheap way. Okay, so you're going to get free materials. So you'll put your cardboard on the bottom and then you're going to fill it 75 the way up with wood chips. Now there's a couple ways that you can get wood chips for free. The number one, the county like maintenance or the trash or the dump sites, they usually keep wood chips. And a lot of counties give them away for free. Some counties even deliver them to your house. You can also reach out and call like tree services in your area. A lot of the times they are in certain areas at certain times and you can check with them. Hey, are you going to be around my neighborhood on such and such date or these weeks? Would you mind dropping your chipped wood? Because what they do is they cut and do tree work either for the county or for homeowners. And then they chip it right out front in those big trucks with the chipper machines on the back. And then they have to usually go pay to dump that. So a lot of the times they're really happy to drop it off in an area if it's local. Now that means you're going to get a huge thing of wood chips. Your other option for free or for a very low cost, just tip cost, is going to be chipdrop.com. And this one hit or miss because sometimes they don't do it in people's areas. Sometimes they do. So those are your options. You're going to fill it 75 of the way up with wood chips. And then the last two, three, four inches, it's just straight compost. If you can find bulk compost at like nurseries in your area, or if you have to, you buy the bagged compost like black cow and you top it off with compost. You are going to need to fertilize the heck out of that bed that first year because those wood chips are robbing of nitrogen. But after one year, it'll be completely broken down. It will be the most beautiful soil. That's actually how I did every single one of my beds except for one. And I did grow in it when it was still wood chips. Weirdly enough, it works. You just really have to use a lot of fertilizer. You have to be putting granular fertilizer down every single month and using liquid in between if somebody doesn't look happy. And you kind of use a lot in that first year. But then once it breaks down, then you're pretty normal after that. Now I want to prepare you. So you fill your bed. It looks great. You grow in it for a year or maybe something happens and you kind of have to abandon your garden. And now you have a bed just sitting there. What you're probably going to notice first is sinkage. So when you grow or start a bed, immediately it starts to sink. And in that first year, because of the soil of our sandy soil being sand, it sinks like really bad. I mean almost like two-thirds of it will sink. It's crazy. And you're gonna have to refill that bed in year one. I'm at year five or six now and my beds don't sink as much as they used to. It probably sinks about three inches a year and I just fill it back up. But how do I fill it back up, right? So there's a few things that you could do to fill it up. One of the ways is using native Florida sand. So if you're doing a project in one area of the yard, you can save some of that sand instead of trying to dispose of it or move it and put it in your beds. Pros and cons with that. If you have nematodes in your soil, you're going to add them into your beds. I did that. It hasn't been that horrible. I've been working through it. You got to make sure that you don't add too much sand because then you have too much drainage in your soil. And then it's no different than growing in the native Florida ground. You could add vermiculite or perlite if you'd rather do that to add some, you know, drainage because all those wood chips that we added or that compost that we added really holds on to water. And during our rainy season, it gets like super waterlogged. So you could add sand perlite or vermiculite. Now, the other thing you want to do is you need biomass. That's what we call it. Biomass means filler. You need stuff to fill it up, right? Probably the number one thing that you can fill it up with. It's more compost. Compost is amazing. I make my own compost. See if you can see it over my shoulder there. Yeah, right there. In my bins over there, I have a bunch of compost. I actually got a bigger bin because I wanted to make even more compost than I currently make. And now those bins actually fill up all of these beds, all the sinkage that happens every single year, all of the beds. I think it's so remarkable. But I also do this right here. I grow during the summer crops that I can use for biomass. So this is one of them, sun hemp. There's a lot of positives about growing on hemp, but I also grow Puerto Rican black beans, cow peas, peanuts, marigolds, just any kind of plant that later on you chop it up and you throw it back in the bed. So when it's time, which I'm going to do this bed later, so I'll show you some videos now, but I'm going to cut these off into pieces. I'm going to do layers so that they're small, right? I don't want to like take just down at the very bottom because I got this long stake thing. So instead, I'm just going to clip it up using hand pruners or an electric hand pruner. So when we cut it off, I'm actually going to kind of push it out of the bed and the little pieces that are down at the bottom, I am going to crush them with my hand or my foot to just kind of break them and force them down. They shouldn't regrow. Sometimes they do and you just pull them. It's no big deal, but you kind of want to leave the bottom of the plant underground and just take the top off. Then I'm going to dump a bunch of compost in that bed, whatever it takes to kind of fill it up. This would be the time that you can add your sand, your perlite, or your vermiculite. The next thing you want to do is you want to add any of your amendments or fertilizers for the season so that you don't have to fertilize all season long. I hate fertilizing. It's not one of my favorite things. So I like to add the amendments. I do a soil test and then I check which amendments. For me, it seems like every single year I'm adding nitrogen. I'm adding potassium. So I'm going to add potash and I'm going to add probably a little bit of blood meal and a little bit of feather meal, a mix of both of them. One kind of feeds very quickly. The other one feeds a little bit longer. So those are the two things I'm going to add, but you could also add bone meal or you could just do an all-purpose fertilizer and lay that on top of the compost. Then you're going to take all this biomass that you had cut down earlier and you're going to throw that right on top. You could also till it in, meaning, you know, kind of use a tiller or use a shovel to kind of shovel it underneath the compost. I like to use it as a mulch. It will eventually make its way and break down on top and it will continue to feed the soil. I'm a big proponent of mulch. So using our plants as mulch is a free mulch rather than having to buy mulch, which once again kind of goes into that idea of whether you want to do something expensive or whether you want to do something cheap. And I think growing this feeds the soil, gives it biomass, and makes a free mulch. So now if you've made it this far, you have the right bed, you have it in a great place, you've filled it up really well. Maybe you've run a cover crop through it and now you have mulch and all the nutrients and everything that you need. You've got your irrigation set up. Everything's wonderful. Now you got to place your plants. So there's a few things that you got to think about, right? So tall plants versus short plants. Plants that need trellises and need to climb things. Which plants are going to be companion plants for other plants? There is this idea also that some plants don't like each other. Well, I don't necessarily agree with that. I think all plants can live together. But there is some negativity of growing, you know, the same plant family together because they all attract the same kinds of diseases and pests. So maybe you want to lay out your garden to where you don't have too many of the same plant hanging around each other so that they're less likely to do that. I actually did an entire video on my fall garden series. I have not only the fall garden where I show how I laid out my garden for what I'm going to be planting for fall, but also I did a video right after that where I talked all about the fall garden layout. So four different layouts depending on the style of gardens. One's a raised bed, grow bags, then we have vertical gardening, and in ground beds. One of each one to give you an idea of how I would arrange things to get the best bang out of my buck for one particular garden area. You're going to want to make sure to check that out. I will put that right here. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and let me know down in the comments. I want to hear if you are getting a new bed and which route you're going. I'm very, very curious. And if you have been growing in raised beds, what has been your experience? Share it with our community below. Happy gardening, you guys!