How to Replant and Prepare Raised Beds For Spring

What's up everyone. Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Today we're learning how to replant a raised bed after you've grown a massive crop in it. So what you're looking at here is arugula, way too much arugula. So what I'm doing is I'm chopping this down right at the soil surface, clipping it down right at the soil surface, but I'm leaving the roots in and we're going to get into that later in the video. Why am I leaving the roots in? Why am I not ripping those out? We're going to get into that. But right now let's talk about how to then amend the soil. Because remember, everything you just saw me take out of that bed was stolen in effect from the soil and the sun. And so if we keep doing that without adding more back, we are depleting our soil of nutrition. I'm adding about two cups of organic worm castings, super good all purpose fertilizer. I'm adding about a cup and a half of my Epic Soil Starter, which is an organic natural fertilizer. And then I'm adding in some organic compost. Now in a perfect world, you are going to be adding compost you've made yourself because that is full of beneficial bacteria, fungi, microbes. But I did not have some, so I bought some. Not the end of the world, but in a perfect world you would be making your own. Now just dump that out over the soil surface. And this is about a half to one inch of total material, which is all you really need when it comes to top dressing for a new planting. And just smooth that out and water that in. What you're not seeing me do here is you are not seeing me dig in with a shovel, dig in with a trowel, break up the soil. I'm not doing that because I practice the no dig method in which I respect the soil life that's going on below the surface to do a lot of my gardening work for me. And why would I want to disrupt that soil life by breaking up the fungi down there, disrupting the bacteria? There's no need. I'm going to just go ahead and stick with that no dig method. And now I am planting, right? I am replanting directly into that amended compost mixture that I made. I'm using the square foot gardening method here. So you can see this is called a seeding square. It's just a planting template and it'll plant at either 16, nine, four, or one per square foot, uh, spacings, depending on the type of plant. So you saw me earlier just put in some beans. Those are about four per square foot. And so I use the blue holes and I put them in at four per square foot. Now let's get back into why do I not rip out the roots? Well, it's, it's really the same reason that I don't dig into the soil. When I'm mixing in new organic matter, what I'm trying to do is give everything that's in the soil that's alive more to work with. So the, the root systems, obviously without the tops are going to be struggling to survive. They will not survive. So they'll start to die and decay. They'll be starting to shred up by earthworms and beetles and things like this, which increases the surface area of that organic matter, which makes it more available to bacteria and fungi to break down even further. And then I've got air pockets where roots used to be, that's aerating and breaking up my soil for me. So a lot of nature is taking care of the processes we would normally do in the garden, which is why I leave in the roots. So you're seeing me freak out about how much arugula I have. And so what I decided to do here is shred up some of this arugula and lay it over the top of my bed as a green mulch. Now, you may want to do this very loosely because it can inhibit the germination of these new seedlings. I don't want to completely smother these. I just wanted to add a little bit of organic matter on top to keep the moisture into the soil and also to increase even further the level of food and organic matter that I'm re-adding to my soil. And so all of this stuff that I'm laying on top, just this shredded arugula, in this case, although it can be many different types of greens or plants or cover crops, all this stuff is going to be eaten by insects, broken down, and then again, become bioavailable to plants after a certain period of time. And so this was a quick and easy tutorial on the most simple way you can prepare and replant a raised bed. Thank you so much. Take it easy. Keep growing.