The TRUTH About Filling Raised Garden Beds With Logs...

By now everyone and their mom has heard of the raised bed filling hack that involves throwing logs in a tall raised bed to save money on soil. But is it even a good idea? I sure want to know the answer because all the beds you see behind me have logs buried in them. And a few years ago Jacques and I even dug them up to see what was going on underneath the soil. Now there are some legitimate critiques to this method. So in this video, what we're going to do is break down what those are and then update our technique so that it mitigates all the problems you could be running into when you're throwing logs in the bottom of a raised bed. We all know that tall raised beds are fantastic for the ergonomics of gardening. I'm a pretty tall guy. I come out here and I can prune and I can primp and I can plant without having to bend over too much. But the soil cost of filling up this bed, this is a 30 inch tall, four foot by eight foot bed. That's about 80 cubic feet worth of soil, which would convert to about 40 or 50 bags of what you'd find at a typical nursery. In dollars, if you're using a premium mix, you're looking at $400 to $1,000 to fill a bed like this. So to offset this cost, we've often recommended throwing logs down on the bottom as well as some other materials we'll get into later in the video. This is a technique adapted from Hugelkultur, which is a German method of throwing logs, sticks, twigs, and then smaller and smaller organic material before you then finally put on a quality layer of soil. And then this will decompose over time. Now it'll save about 60% of your soil needs, which is quite a bit of cash if you're using premium soil. But at the same time it will also break down naturally over time, releasing nutrients back to the soil. And then theoretically, the logs will also decompose, become a bit spongy and release water back up through the subsoil, doing a sort of passive sub-irrigation. However, there are some issues with this method that could be impacting your harvests. Sourcing for wood sounds easy until you actually go out and start looking for disease-free untreated logs. And if you opt to buy firewood, well, that can be a bit expensive. And if you source the wrong species of wood, you can kill your plants via allelopathy, which is basically chemical warfare in the soil that will kill plant life. Never use black walnut, butternut, or pecan wood as it contains juglone, which is a compound that can kill off things like peppers and tomatoes and potatoes. Then you've got cedar, redwood, and black locust, which is a bit ironic because cedar and redwood are some of the best materials to build a wooden raised bed out of. But when buried in a raised bed, they have antifungal properties that will resist decay. In this case, you want the wood to decay so it gets that spongy sort of texture and releases water back up through the soil. And on top of that, you don't want to use pressure treated lumber, painted wood, or any sort of construction offcuts because they could contain synthetic materials as well as things like copper and arsenic. Instead, go with native hardwoods if you can. Oak, maple, birch, poplar, you can go with fruiting woods. Apple is a good one if you've got access to it. You can go with pine or fir. It's a little bit of a softer wood, but it'll still break down just fine. The question is, where do you get these? Where I found the most logs, in fact, all of the logs that filled up the 15 plus raised beds here in the front yard, is from an arborist that was cutting down trees locally. I confirmed it was the right type of tree. I said, Hey, instead of paying a dumping fee, can you just dumping fee it right into my yard? And then I spent quite a bit of time picking up huge logs and putting them in raised beds. That's a really good choice. You can go to like a custom construction, custom sort of hardwood construction shop, see if they've got any cuts of some of the woods that I mentioned. Or you can grab firewood. Oftentimes you can find firewood for quite cheap, even better if it's been sitting out for a season or so. It started that decomposition process. But what if I told you that no matter what kind of wood you get, they're all going to steal a major nutrient that your plants needs right out of the soil. Gardeners who hate this method, and they're out there, will say that if you bury wood in the soil, it's going to steal nitrogen from your plants. And they're completely right. Here's the thing. Wood has a carbon to nitrogen ratio of about 400 to one. And the soil microbes that will start breaking down this wood as it's buried underneath the soil, require nitrogen to build their bodies. They need it to reproduce. So they're going to steal nitrogen from the surrounding soil area. Meaning that if your plant's roots are anywhere near the intersection of the wood and the soil, they may not be getting enough nitrogen. And as we know, nitrogen is the most important macronutrient for plant growth. However, I personally don't think it's that big of a deal. When you're planting in a raised bed like this, and frankly, even in the ground, although plant roots can get much deeper than 12 inches, a lot of the nutrition that they're taking out of the soil is coming in that first six to 12 inches or so. And in a tall bed like this, this is probably as high as I'd go with a log. Meaning that I have this much space of pure, high quality soil for a plant's roots to use to uptake nutrients. I'm not really that worried about this intersection point right here. And if I am really worried about it, I'm going to show you how to mitigate it in the upcoming updated fill guide later on in the video. What about pests? They can be a real problem in the garden. They can wreak havoc on your harvests and burying wood underground in the raised bed where you're growing the plants might attract things like termites or carpenter ants. Those aren't really a problem for the plants, but they certainly could be a problem for your house. And then we've also run into issues where we threw the logs down in the bottom and we said, okay, well, nothing's going to be able to dig up there, right? So we don't have to do anything about it. Not true. We've seen moles, voles, and gophers all kind of coming up, munching on our plants and making us very sad. And it's really hard to fix that problem once you've already built the bed. So for the digging issue, the best thing you can do is when you're throwing a new raised bed down, put quarter inch hardware cloth down. It's a really weird name. I don't know why they use the word cloth for it, but it's a very heavy duty metal mesh that you can cut to size and all the better if you can find stainless steel so it won't rust out. That'll give you many years of protection from any digging pest. They can't get up. And if you're dealing with the termites, or at least if you're worried about them, we think this is a good idea anyway. So just locate your garden at least 15 feet away from your home. I think most people can manage that. I would say 10 to 15 feet is a good rule of thumb. Now this next problem is one that you probably won't notice until you've already planted and it's a little bit too late. And it's the issue of soil settling and creating weird little air pockets that very well could hamper your plant's growth. What's happening when you fill a raised bed up, or really any container, is that you have a nice fluffy mix. And then as you water it in, as the plant grows, it starts to settle and fall down. It compacts a bit. So what can happen is what you're seeing right here. You see this soil level fall down. It really should be up to about here or so. And if you've got logs in the bottom, that just exacerbates the problem because you've got these big chunky things that are taking up space. Then there's these little pockets, perfect spots for soil to kind of fall through. It's really annoying when it happens because your soil level can fall six to even 12 inches in the most extreme cases. But again, we figured out a way to prevent this. Now there is one more thing that you can run into and it's that if there's not enough drainage at the bottom, the logs can sit in basically like a heavy clayish water logs type of mixture and do something called going anaerobic, meaning there's no oxygen down there. It's going to be very foul, stinky, and you're not going to have a happy time when the plant roots get down there. They're just, they can't grow in an anaerobic environment. They need oxygen to breathe. So I've been talking trash about the buried logs method this entire video, but I still use it in my garden. So let's show you exactly how we've solved all of these issues. Okay. Before I show you this method, I've got some very exciting news to share. It's huge news for us here at Epic Gardening and hopefully for you guys too. So for years, seven years, eight years, I've been growing in these metal raised beds that you've seen here on the homestead, back at the old garden in the earlier days of Epic Gardening. But today is the first day I can say I'm growing in Epic Gardening metal raised beds, our very own line, designed to support all the other amazing products that we carry here at Epic Gardening. So if you've watched this channel for a while, you know we carried Bertie's Raised Beds and that was a fantastic partnership. But as we've grown, as we've developed our own line of seed trays, our own line of grow bags, our own line of seeds, it just made sense to bring the beds under our own name so we can make 100% of the changes and continually improve the product for you guys. But at the same time, we wanted to offer as much as we could to you with our own line of raised beds. So we've got a limited lifetime warranty, which means that if anything crops up during normal service, check out the warranty program and we'll service the bed. If you've never tried them before, we have 120 day trial program where if you don't like it, you can send it back. And if you love it, you can just keep growing some Epic Harvests. Then the topic of safety has always come up around metal raised beds. Of course, important in wood too. You wouldn't want to use pressure treated wood, but what are in these beds and are they okay to use? We didn't want to just talk about it. We wanted to be about it. So we ran the beds through a slew of tests, which they all pass with flying colors and we provide those results on our site or to anyone who asks. So as of right now, you can get Epic Metal Raised Beds in any size you want and all of the classic colors that we've always carried. But this is just the beginning guys, I swear. We've got really cool new models, new shapes, potentially new colors coming as well as accessories and so much more. So you can grab them all at shop.epicgardening.com. But now let's show you how to fill up one of these Epic beds. So let's put our bed down. And the first thing we've done is lay down that hardware cloth that I mentioned. Quarter inch, ample coverage outside of the bed perimeter. It's staked down. We can cover it up with mulch. And now I just need a little bit of help filling this bed. I think I have enough logs for you here. Jacques, the garden hermit, let's fill this bed. So the first step is still the same as our original method, but with a little bit more particularness, I would say. Yeah, more careful placement. In the past, I would just dump logs down in here, mostly because I had a lot of mulching to do. I had a lot of soil moving to do. But what you can do, we talked about settling. Yeah. What you can do is just kind of jenga these pieces in to take up as much volume as you can. So you'll want to take the biggest logs and put them in. And Jacques, we're just kind of playing, playing a puzzle here. So at this phase, you've got a good base layer of logs in. I find it's good to wet the logs just a bit. Extra credit, if you soak them beforehand, but it's not necessary. Now here's the first adaptation to the technique. Jacques got a shovel, do the shake. We're going to shake and wet the soil because we want to fill these cracks when we can still see them. So we are going to put a touch of soil down here just to make sure that we don't get settling. And theoretically this will also add some extra nitrogen down on this layer, but we'll show you a technique for that as well. Now we're also going to do a light dusting of fertilizer down here. Why? Because if we can supplement some additional nitrogen at this layer, where it's getting locked out, then hopefully we've got a little bit of a buffer for our plants to still absorb some. A technique that Jacques does that I love is he uses the full or jet feature on the hose and really blasts some of the soil into those crevices so that you just get even less settling. This is also a good time to put in any debris or yard waste, clippings, grass clippings, even food scraps are a good idea at this phase. We'll put another layer of fertilizer right here amongst our food scraps and yard waste. And now it's time to fill the top of the bed. At this point, we have a bed with some extra fertilizer in there, Jacques, to hopefully offset the nitrogen lockout. We've compacted it just a bit. We filled it up with a lot of cheap or free material. And it's time to put in the soil. Now you can almost think of the soil layer as two layers if you really, really wanted to. And you could have a less expensive mix at about, I don't know, 30% to 50%? Like a filler. And you could put the really premium, premium stuff on top. Cause like we said, six, eight inches of soil for a lot of these annual vegetables and fruits that we're growing. Yeah, that's where we're getting a lot of our nutrition into the plant root system. That being said, we're going to fill it up with one of our favorite mixes, which is the Fox Farm Raised Bed Planter mix. And at this point, you're really just filling the bed. This is a little super extra credit, but I like to put a little dose of organic fertilizer right at the top as well. Not that the mix doesn't have it, but again, it's going to break down slowly over time. We're going to probably plant this pretty intensively, maybe strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, beans. Why not give a little bit of extra fertilizer in the mix as Jacques comes in with our final layer? Another tip I like Jacques is overfilling the bed slightly. It's going to settle even though we did the compaction techniques. So if you fill it and it looks like it's overflowing a little bit, do not worry about it. That's completely fine. I'll even skip the first day after filling just to give it some time to settle in before you plant it. I don't know about you guys, but this looks pretty damn good to me. I like to give it a healthy water at this point. Helps to really saturate the soil. It activates granular fertilizer so that the microbes that are in the soil can start breaking it down. And you have a bed that still saves you money without suffering from the very real problems that you can run into when putting a ton of logs in a tall raised bed like this. So thank you so much. Not only for watching this video, but supporting Epic Gardening over the many, many years of this channel's life. I mean, actually this channel has been around for 13 years now, which is crazy to think about. And for supporting us as we grow our business here. There are actually a lot of people behind the scenes here at Epic Gardening. We're a big team. We've got our seed company, botanical interests. We're always cranking out new seeds and new products. And this is one of our flagships, a base to build off of for the future of what's to come here at Epic Gardening. So check out our Epic Metal Beds at shop.epicgardening.com. Any questions about the technique, drop them in the comments. We'll see you next time. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.