How to Create No Dig Garden Beds

So this here is the bulk compost I got. This is one cubic yard of compost to jump start my no-dig slash lasagna garden. When I get going with our homestead plan, I'm going to be using all of the leaves that we get from the trees. Probably I'm going to collect leaves from other yards as well, and all of the grass clippings. I never used to collect our grass clippings, but now I've got a good reason to. And I'm going to be making my own compost and feeding the soil that way and using that as a mulch layer for the no-dig method. This year I did not have that ready to go, so I had to kind of prime the pump, if you will, and get things started. And that's where this came in. So I encourage you, whether you use it for gardening or just for around the yard, if you don't have a way to get a big quantity or you don't have your compost yet, you can search around. Don't give up on your idea. You can search around and find composters. This was from actually a green waste site in the city of Toledo, where they accept leaves and branches and yard waste. They're selective. They don't allow, you know, hazardous materials to be brought in. They do screen for that. So when I talked with the people there, they get really high marks for this because this compost is made exclusively with grass clippings and leaves that are dropped off. They go out and they mix it out into a field, they turn it on a regular basis, and it takes, he told me, between two and three years before this is done. So it's obviously probably not a hot compost pile if it's taking that long, but what I feel a little bit more comfortable about is that if it's taking that long, any of the potential herbicide residue or non-organic fertilizers that might be in the grass clippings are going to dissipate and degrade, and I'll have very little, if any, of that in this compost. And again, this is just going to be for my first year. We don't do any chemical or inorganic methods in our yard, it'll just be our leaves and our grass clippings moving forward, but I had to do something to get this idea to make it a reality. So this was the best I could come up with. But I have to say it's encouraging because this is really awesome stuff. Really black, it's wonderful looking, it's very loose, it's loamy, you can compact it, it crumbles apart. Even the big clumps like this, you can just crack them right open and they just crumble right apart. So I can see how this is going to have very little weed seeds, I can see how this is going to be helpful in retaining and regulating moisture in the garden bed, and I can see how this is going to be wonderful for roots to go through and worms and microorganisms to use this to create that structure in the soil and everything that's needed for diversity that's going to support our vegetable garden. So we're going to go ahead and get this unloaded and dump this on the garden for our last layer. Before we get the compost layer on, I first decided to put down a layer of topsoil. We started out doing the lasagna method, and if you're not familiar with that you can check my other videos, but basically you take your garden area and on top of that you start doing like sheet composting. We put down wood chips, grass clippings, chewed up straw and hay, layers of grass clippings on top of that, and we built that up three or four layers. As I looked at it, I was really concerned because there was not going to be enough material to actually plant my seeds in, so I decided to kind of switch things up and go to a no-dig method on top of that. So out of concern, I decided to put a layer of good topsoil on top of my lasagna gardening, and then I'm going to go ahead and put in a final layer of the compost. And so here's a little bit of how we basically did that. As you can tell, this is definitely a lot of work, and we've gone to great lengths and a lot of effort to do this, but this is our first garden, and these are going to be permanent garden beds. And so I just thought, you know what, I want to do the best I can to get a solid foundation. Once this is done, and once the compost and the topsoil and these layers are finalized, I'm confident that the only thing we're going to have to do year after year is just put on another inch or two of good quality compost to feed the soil. We're not going to disturb the soil structure. We're not going to be doing rototilling. We'll just do some cultivation, a little bit of aeration with broadfork, but these beds are going to remain as is. So after we got the topsoil spread, I enlisted the help of one of my sons to have him help me spread this topsoil out, and we just did a layer probably about two to three inches thick. So the beds that we've gone with initially here are four beds. They are three feet wide and approximately 12 feet long. We didn't want to bite off more than we could chew with this first garden, so we're just doing a small area so we can learn, get the basics down, and then we've got plenty of extra space where we can expand this garden in years to come. Always get the best quality topsoil you can afford. This was nice topsoil that's all screened. It's from a trusted source, and you can just tell when you work with it how nice it is to spread out, and it's just a really good quality. With the topsoil down, now we're going to go ahead with my other son, and this was on a different day, but we went ahead and started to unload the compost and get that spread out and get piles of that kind of distributed amongst the garden beds. So while I'm doing this, I think this would be a good time just to point something out kind of interesting here as a visual. This is the compost. This is the screened topsoil that I put down just yesterday, so you can already tell the difference just in the color. This is not soil yet. It's on its way there, I guess, but it just holds so much moisture, and it's just a totally different texture. I mean, this is like good quality topsoil, and it's nice and loose, but it's just totally dry. So this right here is just, I don't know, to me totally shows the point and makes the point how this is going to help with the moisture and soil structure here. So nice. With the compost all laid down, my final step was to edge the perimeter of all of my garden beds. Rather than do garden paths in between, I decided to go ahead and keep this area lawn, so I can mow that and get the grass clippings. And so I went through and I edged it with a nice edging tool that I purchased locally, and it just makes a nice fine edge. I've seen landscapers do this for residential, and it makes a hard edge where grass won't creep in, and it keeps your beds, the topsoil kind of mounded up. Now, on your homestead, it's important to save and reuse all of the resources you have. And so rather than pitch all that soil and grass, we loaded that up in the wheelbarrow, and we're taking that into our coop here, and we're going to let our chickens pick over that. And in our coop, we're also starting a secondary compost area to help feed our chickens and offset our feed costs. And you'll see some other videos on that as well. But here, the chickens are going to have a nice chance to pick through this and find something good to eat. So that's how we did our garden beds. We planted our garden and put our transplants in probably about two weeks after we did this video. So we're very happy with how things turned out. I hope you learned something. I hope you found some encouragement. If you're just getting started, I hope that you continue, you don't give up, find the gardening method that works for you, and enjoy the process. Thanks so much for watching. See you next time.