How to Fill, Fertilize, Plant, AND Mulch a Raised Bed from START to FINISH

Here at the new homestead I'm replacing some of the in-ground beds I have in the front yard to really mimic the old garden I had at my old front yard urban spot. So what that means is more raised beds and that means filling the raised beds in a way that's economical. I've done a video on this in the past about how to fill your raised beds for cheap, but I didn't show you the exact process. And I used a bagged mix instead of a self-created mix. So what I'm going to do in this video is show you how to fill the bottom up and create your own mix to fill up a large raised bed. Sitting here on a bunch of logs, which are going to make up the base of our raised bed. Now this does a couple of things. Number one, it just bulks out the bottom with organic matter that will break down over time, but it kind of removes the need for you to put down crazy amounts of landscape fabric, a non-natural material and or hardware cloth for those digging pests. Because if you've got some logs in the bottom, they're not coming up through the bottom of the bed anyways. So let's hoist some of these logs over into that raised bed, cultivate that Like button for epic, efficiently filled raised beds and let's get into filling this. So what we want to do, first of all, you want to make sure that your bed is nice and level, but in go round one of our logs. So this is going to take up at least half of the volume. And I've gone about two feet away from each of these fence sides. So I can still walk around and get into this bed from any angle without any problems. So log one is in. Let's do the rest. So the logs are in. And now because I'm now obsessed with everything being nice and level, this side's a little high. So I'm going to lift the frame and just pull some of this material out from down below until we're nice and level. Remember you set it up once and you pretty much never move it again unless you have to move. The nice thing is if you want to move it, like you can see, it's pretty lightweight, but I want to make sure it's level from the start. We got to push up about an inch on that side or lower this side about an inch. So let's get to it. Now we've got the logs in, but there's a lot of empty space still in the bottom. I don't want to fill that with good soil because it's going to go to waste. And so I've got this wood chip material. Now wood chips wouldn't be the best idea if you were mixing them in to the soil. But if I put them here at the bottom, it's not a huge deal. There's some pine needles. You can see it's pretty hot in here. If I touch it, it's steaming up. So this will of course break down over time. So let's get a wheelbarrow full in there and you just want to fill in those gaps at the bottom. I'll tell you, a couple, couple days ago I moved this entire pile you see here in a single day. And let's just say my back was a little bit painful. Little farm workout action. All right. Should be good. Let's go. In we go with our material. It's pretty lightweight. So let's just dump it in there. Make sure you get it down into every crevice. Otherwise you're going to have a lot of soil settling that you probably don't want. All right. We're a little bit less than halfway full. So I am going to put a little bit more of this mulch in here. Okay. So wood chips, a lot of people say it's bad to add mixed in with the garden, but that's only if they're mixed, intermixed. This is a bottom layer. So this should be completely fine to add into the garden. If I was to then fork this all up and mix it, oh look, we got the devil Japanese beetle right there. Your fig eating beetle. Anyways, our layer's in. We got about 18 inches of soil, 15 inches of soil to build, to fill up to here. It's a new day. And I am ready to mix up this raised bed soil for you guys. We've got some compost. We have some peat moss and we have some vermiculite. And for those of you who are longtime gardeners, you know that that makes up the basis of a very classic mix known as Mel's Mix. Mel Bartholomew, author of Square Foot Gardening, one of the bestselling garden books, if not the bestselling garden book of all time. Very fortunate to have been a mentor of mine. Early on in my gardening career, I worked with him for about 18 months or so. So we're going to pay homage to Mel by mixing up a very classic mix here. So what you have is compost. Now I've got some organic mushroom compost. This is from my friends over at Esploma Organic. I also have some of their Land and Sea, which I really, really love. So compost is one third by volume of the mix. Then you have peat moss. Remember compost, nutrition. Peat moss is your water retention component. You could swap this out with coconut coir as well. No problems with that. Some sustainability concerns sometimes that people like to prefer coconut coir over peat moss. This is an old bag of mine. I'm going to make use of it. Better to use it than to not use it. All right, now we have some vermiculite. Now vermiculite is a little bit on the pricier side as far as soil amendments goes. It's a bit of an aeration and a water retention mixture. It's kind of a mix between the two of those. Does a really nice job of lightening up the mix and just making sure that you don't have way too much water holding from the compost and the peat moss mixture. So what we're going to do is I'm going to dump these on the ground, dump these on the ground, dump these on the ground. We're going to use this fork to mix it up. We'll wet it along the way. So let's get to it. First thing down is our vermiculite. You can see it's a very fine grained, uniform amendment here. And that's why you need stuff like compost, which is still relatively uniform, especially if it's been produced in a good way and it's been sifted out and screened, but it still has more texture to it and obviously quite a bit more nutrition. When you're doing a compost in a perfect world, you're using as many sources as you can possibly get. So right now we have mushroom compost and we have land and sea. So we're getting it from mushrooms. We're getting it from, you know, shellfish and such. And you can even see a slight difference in the texture and even the color of these two fertilizers here. All right, now the peat moss. Now this, like I said, it's a really old bag of peat moss that I may need to kind of scrape off. The thing that you can run into with peat moss is sometimes it likes to stay a little bit tough. It doesn't want to rehydrate as much. So you want to make sure that you get these chunks off of it. You don't want to just put a nice chunk in there. It's not going to actually mix well. So sometimes you do have to do a little bit of deconstruction here, but no big deal. Once peat moss actually hydrates back up, it will retain water quite well. But when it's completely dry like this one, it can be a little bit hydrophobic. And that's why I choose to do it this way. You know what? I'm actually going to set this block aside. Some of the stuff in here is a little more broken down. So let's use that instead. Now what I'm going to do is just get a little water in the mix already. We'll be wetting this throughout, so no big deal here. And of course, this is just a sample mix. We're going to need more than this to fill our tall 30 inch raised bed that you've seen us set up earlier. There we go. A nice flat shovel to make quick work of this mixing task. Again, the mixing part is so important. Imagine if we just did this directly in the bed, we would not be coming anywhere near the right amount of mixing that we're looking for. So spend some time on this part and make sure you get a perfect blend going on. If you're going to overdo any of the ingredients, I would say it's a good idea to overdo on the compost side. Just want to balance this out a little bit more. There we go. Let's keep on mixing. I'll do the rest of the mixing off camera, but I wanted to give you a sense of what this soil actually starts to look like. I'm going to add a little bit more compost. And then when we go and fill it in, I'll show you a couple other amendments I like to add in. The fun part has now begun. It's time to start actually filling this up. So there's a couple of things to keep in mind here. You're going to get natural settling, at least an inch per season. But at the beginning, because there's so much compression to go on, you know, with the mulch down below, the logs, et cetera, you're going to get probably three or four, sometimes even five inches at the start. So overfill your bed, then put some mulch on top. It'll drop down. And then the next season or the second season you grow in this, you're going to want to heavily add a couple more inches of compost on top. So the benefit to having a tall raised bed like this, for me, it's, I mean, I just like to work from a tall raised bed. I'm very tall. It's easier on my back. But once the setup is done, and I will admit, you know, it can be a little intense and or pricey to set up at the start. But once it's done, I mean, it's done. You got a nice soil ecosystem in here. So back for another wheelbarrow full. And you can wet this as you go. Make sure everything's nice and hydrated up. We have it filled up. Bit of a chore, but well worth it. I am going to throw some organic granular fertilizer in here. Of course we've added our compost, which is our main nutrition source for the soil. But I like to add in some slow release granular fertilizer because that's going to break down over time in this fall bed because it's fall right now. But you can do this at any part of the season when you're building out a new bed. So I don't need to be hyper particular. This is a Spomo Organics Garden Tone, which I'm a huge fan of. But I just give it a light sprinkle. There are application instructions on the back, but again, a light sprinkle and work into the soil is my go-to. I'm doing it afterwards because I'm most concerned that that's in the first few inches of soil rather than the entire mix straight out of the gate. Remember after this, I'm probably just going to top dress with compost from here on out and not do a whole lot of massive soil amendment. So I just want to work this in to the first few inches of soil over time. And then we'll water this in after we smooth it out. I am obsessed with the fact that I do not have to bend over right now because I have the taller 30 inch. On my old garden, right, my old garden, I had the 15 inch originals, which I really like and I still have, but I want to use more of these taller ones if I personally can, just because I don't want to mess my back up over the course of the year. So we're nice and leveled out here. Let's grab our hose. We'll give it a nice little water in. And that's it for this part of the process. Later on today, I'm going to come back and we'll put in some fall seedlings just to kind of show you how to fully set up, fill and plant out a raised bed. So we'll be using some mulch and we'll talk a little bit about some plant spacing and things like that. So I'll see you guys later this evening. Good evening. It certainly feels a lot better out here now, nice and cool. Sun's about to go down. So the bed's looking amazing and I want to plant out. Now I waited till the evening just for personal comfort, but also transplanting in in the middle of the day with some sensitive seedlings, not a good recipe for success. Wait until it cools down, either at the evening, which it is now, or in the early morning is also a decent time to do it. I kind of like the evening cause then you get more of a moderate temperature throughout the course of the night. Of course, unless you get into a frost territory, which then you have to watch out for that or add some kind of frost protection. Now let's talk about what I have here. I've got some brassica crops because it's fall, but these tips will apply to any season you're growing in. So we have kale, some cabbages. I'm going to focus on the kale here and let's talk first about plant spacing. A lot of people get this confused or they just find it confusing because the back of the seed packet in most cases is really sort of an antiquated way of describing spacing. So one thing you can do if you are more of a systems type of gardener is grid it out and use the square foot gardening method, which in the world of kale would be four per square foot. It basically tells you how many plants per square foot you can place based on the plant. Tomato, one per square foot. Radish, 16 per square foot. Kale I believe is four per square foot, which is roughly about six inches apart from each other. Now traditionally you would probably plant kale about 12 inches apart. So let's go ahead and do it. I like to come in with a little knife like this. That way I actually get all the roots out. It's going to be okay if you damage the roots a little bit, but why make a habit of it, right? So I start from a corner in the raised bed and I want to offset it at least about four, five inches or so. I'll make a little depression down in the soil. I don't thin out quite yet. I just want to see if anything weird happens when I transplant. You know, if the one I picked as my winner ends up wilting or gets damping off disease or something comes and munches it, well then now I have nothing left. And so I want to transplant in with all of my plants and then later on, maybe in about a week or so, I'll come through and do a thin. There's different methods to that, but that is the one that I prefer. So let's go ahead, zoom in and do the rest. So as we do this, it is a repetitive process. Let's talk about some other things that you may have questions about. Number one, what do you do about mulch? Mulch is highly recommended on top of a raised bed and I will be adding it. Should you do this transplanting process before you mulch or should you do it after you mulch? And the short answer is really either one is fine. So let me show you the mulch that I will be using and let's talk just a little bit about what I like about it. So this is a shredded straw mulch. So I've planted these two areas. See, I can just go ahead and lay the mulch down. It's not a big deal. I didn't bury them. I didn't mess with them too much. I'm just going to gently lay this down. Now, why do I like this shredded straw? Number one, it is shredded. It's not these very long stalks of straw. Number two, this one's pre-cleaned. It's got 99-ish percent, 95 to 99% of weed seeds are out of it, which I really prefer. And number three, it breaks down quickly. So it's going to actually make its way into your soil over time. Number four, there's actually one more. It's light colored. And so especially for me as I plant these brassicas here into a somewhat hot fall, I would much rather have a little bit more reflectivity in my mulch than I would choose something nice and dark colored. So that's why I like this particular one. But as you can see, we're just coming in and transplanting. It's really a fun and simple process that you don't have to stress out about too much. Now here's kind of an interesting point, just a little factoid about plant spacing. I'm going to move the mulch aside so you get a better sense of what I'm talking about here. Now, where should I place this one in this next little mini row? Should I place it right here where it is parallel in a straight line to the one right here, the scale plant? Or should I place it over here or should I place it right here? Well, if you use what we call rectangular spacing, so we could do one here, one here, that's pretty standard. It's pretty classic. But again, if you're trying to maximize your space, why not offset it halfway between the distance right here? But by doing that, you get to cram in some extra ones and you actually maximize your space quite a bit while not getting it too much closer together because you're offsetting the rows. So look, this distance is still equal to these two distances right here. You're basically creating an equilateral triangle, hence the name triangular spacing. So that's just a fun little spacing tip that if you are cramped on space, I think you will enjoy and get a lot of value out of. Final step is to just give it that drink, a nice healthy drink. And remember to come in and actually check down in the soil and make sure that you've hydrated it enough. It's a really common mistake when you set up a raised bed to not water it enough. Then you transplant in some young tender seedlings that don't have a nice root system established. And what happens? They fry in the sun. So again, guys, raised beds. One of the best things in the world to garden in, clearly a favorite of mine. And then these particular beds are called Birdies Raised Beds. They come straight out of Australia. They are the original metal garden bed, the most popular bed in Australia, in the entire country. And I now sell them here in America. So I probably get pitched, I don't even know, a hundred products a month to talk about on Epic Gardening. And to date only three ever have been quality enough for me to actually buy and sell here in America. And this is one of them. So if you're interested, we have a full line of colors, sizes, and shapes that you can check out on the Epic Gardening store. Just restocked for a November delivery. So check that out. It's one of the ways to support Epic Gardening if you get some value out of this content. But it's already getting hot. It's kind of early right now. I waited until the next day to water this in. So I'm going to finish this up and head back inside, get myself a little breakfast. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing. I might get this corn too.