Raised Bed Gardens for Beginners - Planning, Soil Mix, and Planting Guide

C-H-A-R-D? Shard. Oh, wait. Shard. S-H-A-R-D. Yeah. So basically we have the plant. So you have, you have your soil mix, you know how much soil you need, and you know roughly what you want to grow. And now we kind of have to think, how much do we need? Like plant-wise, how many plants do we need? You know, because you have, what were the measurements again? It was four feet, five inches, two feet, five inches by one foot. Okay, so then you've got two boxes like this. Right, four feet, five inches. So let's just say four, just for simplicity, and two. So you have eight square feet roughly, right? And certain plants are planted at certain densities. So like with spinach, you can have four per square foot, right? Or with arugula, you could have four per square foot. So if you want to do a whole bed of arugula with a two by four foot bed, you could actually have eight. You have 32 plants, you know what I mean? Yeah. So it could get that, it could get that dense if you want it to, but it doesn't have to. I mean you can plant as sparsely as you want. So we have more. That's the house. So we have two boxes. Yeah, so now we think about where the sun, draw like a sun arrow. Sun's coming in kind of like this, right? Oh, we're going full on. Give me a smiley face. There we go. Yeah, so he's coming in that way, which means the things that grow tall, you want in the back, because otherwise they'll ruin. Yeah, tomato, tomato. We're going to just start calling tomatoes toms. Toms. That's what everyone calls them anyways. So you can do toms right there, because even if you did toms here, it would block these ones a little bit. There's nothing coming, the sun's coming near, there's nothing for these tomatoes to ruin. So what's our shortest plant? Spinach is going to be the shortest one on your list. Okay. So you'd want to lead with that, probably. So you could just do spinach across here, then you could do like a chard across, or maybe a kale, probably, because you would need more kale than chard, I would think. Probably. Are those the only four things we want to grow? Maybe we go there, see what we have. Yeah, I mean, for sure take it with you. They might not have exactly what you want either, right? So we'll make some adjustments. So how much will the chard cut up our stomachs? It will destroy your insides. It will destroy them. It's like basically eating chard's glass. Yeah. That's why it's named that. Yeah. All right guys, we are taking this gardening novice to Home Depot, the noob right here, Michael, to Home Depot to get some soil. We're going to make our own soil mix. We're going to get some plants. We're choosing easy things that he likes to eat, but they're also easy to care for because when you're a beginner, the biggest thing that stops you from keeping on gardening is that your plants fail for some reason, and then you get discouraged, and then you just quit. So we're off to Home Depot to get some soil. Soil for these guys, and we need to make our own mixture because the last thing you want to do is buy like bags and bags and bags of this stuff because it's just going to waste money. Kicking up that peat moss, these hunks. This is why they lift. We've got four, two bags of steer, three bags of chicken, two bags of peat moss, and one bag of basic garden soil. And now we're off to get the perlite. All right, so we got the guys, their soil mix. We've got vermiculite and perlite, about seven cubic feet for that one third of aeration and drainage. Then we've got peat moss down here, about seven cubic feet for that water retention. And then finally we have chicken, cow and compost for our organic matter. Now you can make this cheaper by using coconut coir instead of peat moss. You can make your own compost and then you can use pumice instead of the vermiculite and the perlite. But this is a mix that's going to serve you really well in the long term. And it's going to last for years and years, as long as you amend it over time and you kind of practice that no dig or that permaculturist style approach once you have it installed. So there we go. Now it's time to pick out the plants. Picking some toms. We got everything we need to get started in the garden. Did some damage, did some damage at the old Home Depot. So we've got all of our organic matter in that section right there, which is going to be manure, different types of manure, as well as some garden soil in the back for some extra organic matter. Two of the sunshine mixes in the back for peat moss, which is going to be our water retention. And then we have some vigorous stuff, some perlite and some vermiculite. A lot of people will do just perlite or just vermiculite. I like to mix both of them. They're similar in their qualities, but vermiculite is less fluffy and it holds onto more water. Perlite, much lighter, much fluffier and holds onto much less water. So I like to blend those in as my aeration component for the soil. What's the watering schedule supposed to be like? A great question. Usually you want to water when it's dry to about two inches, one inch deep. So if you put your finger down and you can see the color, like if it's wet or dry. If it's dry about an inch deep, then it's probably time to water. That usually ends up being like once every two to three days, usually. So a good rule of thumb, once every two to three days. The tomatoes are a weird one because basically they have stem cells on their roots or on their stems, aptly named I guess, that become anything, right? And so if you bury the stem deeper, you could just plant it where it's level to here, right? But if you take off that and that and even that, all these little hairs that you see are basically kind of the stem cells of the plant and they can become anything. So if you bury it to here, roots will just start popping out across all here, which means it's more established. It's easier to grow. So you bury it deeper? You bury tomatoes pretty deep, yeah. You take it, sink it, you know, and then just see how I covered all that? Now that's flush to a new you know, sort of bottom. Yep. And all the stuff that's surrounding the soil or the roots will just start coming out like crazy. You just do that with the other one. And so we'll put this one here, we'll put that one there, and then we'll kind of train them both up this. And if it gets crazy, we'll figure out how to deal with that later. So with that one... Are we okay? That one you'll want to take off that, that, that, that. Yeah. So just cut kind of close, you know, you probably want to take that one and either this one. Yeah, yeah. And then dig it in and you want to bury it to about where that, where this one's coming out of the ground or coming out of the stem. Break open kind of some of the bottom and kind of like just open it up a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Because it's, it's root bound, right? And so the roots will keep doing that unless you kind of break it up a little bit. There you go. So you can get it deeper. Yeah, go a little deeper, go a little deeper. Over here? Yeah. And then bury that around. Happy home. This, this stuff you can honestly just leave on the bed. It'll just eventually, yeah, not right away, but eventually it'll break down. So that's tomatoes. The thing about tomatoes you have to watch for is the thing I was telling you about. Every time, see this? See how there used to be a little stem there? Used to be a little stem there? You'll see those start to pop up and if you let those go, the tomato will become this crazy bush that you won't be able to control. You want to leave one main stem. So we're basically doing square foot gardening, which is just a planting method. You'd like it, like it's like very geometric. So you've got this, right? This is your vertical one inch, one square foot, sorry. Then you've got about here, here and here, right? Yeah. So our tomatoes are fitting in this, this and this. We can put three chard, or sorry, three kale. We can go like here, here and there for the kale. Kind of like that. What about this space? This space we may not have bought plants for. I don't think we did. But we'll, that's fine. We'll leave that for now. You can plant spinach in, you can plant spinach in if you want. We'll figure something out for that. Okay. Um, or go kale here. Does it make sense to go one, two, three and keep in the middle and then have as much spinach as we need? Hey, I mean you have more seeds for spinach, so you can do it that way. It doesn't make sense to keep the spinach together. So let's put the kale back here. Like one, two, three. First, we got to split those up a bit. Yeah. So just, yeah, kind of rip that peat off. And then you can damage the roots a little bit, but just try not to like ruin them, you know, because they'll kind of be grown together. How deep am I going? This one, you kind of want to get it right around the base, just right around the base. So right in there, always slightly deeper than you think though. That's good there. And then we'll do another kale right about there, kind of stagger them, you know, and I'll do one right here. So our kale's there. We can do another plant here. We can do maybe a chard here, kind of fill it up this way, you know. So you can plant these, like this is peat, right? You can plant them in. You can plant them in that, but I find at the very least you would want to rip the bottom off. And since there's so many of these, these will become their own plant. Yeah. Like we bought one plant, but we actually got four. So we'll go, uh, chard. Yeah. Chard, chard. And I think there's four here, so we might be able to do four. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to sort of, there's one. Some of these might not take because they're kind of a little weak, a little weak looking, but that's okay. We'll just see. So chard. Probably do one like right there. Yeah. Right about there. And I'll do one right here. And then this little guy. Yeah. This one looks like it's not going to survive. It might not. It very well might not, but that's okay. We kind of want to get it where this, see how this is all coming out right there? Yeah. Like you can bury this stuff and just put it right there. Okay. Because it needs like a little ground. Chard kind of like comes out and then like sits on the ground like that. It's weird. Okay. So we're good there. But now, in this bed at least, we're going. So spinach. So we've got one. Yeah, exactly. We got this, this, and this. And then we'll do four per square foot. Four seeds? Four plants per square foot. And so we'll go one, two, three, four. Yeah. Don't go super deep. Way too deep. You want to go about a half inch deep max for this. Because the deeper you go, the more you're making the seed work to come up, right? So just not a whole lot. And I'll let you guys do this part. Then I'll just show you the basic. All you're really doing here is you got, let's say this seed has like a 90% chance of germinating, right? So then if we put in like 20, like two of them won't even come up on average, right? So if you just put two seeds in each hole, you drastically increase the chances that it's going to come up. So you put two or three in. Like if you put three in, it's almost impossible that something won't come up. So I like to do three just to guarantee it. Cool. And now all we're doing is we're just like lightly, not like compacting it like crazy, but we're just covering it up and then we're good to go. And then in a perfect world, you'd have a little like marker. You'd say, Oh, good. So the thing you'll have to remember is let's say all three seeds come up, right? Well, if you grow all three in one hole, then you'll have like 12 per square foot, right? Yeah. Which would be way too much. So what you want to do is you want to cut off like right where it starts coming out of the ground, the weakest ones. It's basically evolution. Like you're just cutting off the ones that do not do the best. Hit it again. And then we'll get this other one. All that matters at the start is that they have enough. And then for this bed, since it's all starting from seed, what matters is that the seeds are moist enough to germinate. Because what a seed needs to germinate basically is for the most part, darkness, heat, and water. That's what creates the motion of life in the seed.