7 Raised Bed Gardening Techniques to Maximize Your Results

If you're a raised bed gardener looking to maximize how much production you get out of your space, then this video is for you. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb so that you can eat these beautiful peas like I've got hanging out here in this little raised bed. I'm no stranger to raised bed. Many of you are no stranger to growing in raised beds, but there are a lot of little nuances or intricacies to growing in them that I think could really help you boost your production, decrease the amount of pests and disease you deal with, just overall have more success, which is exactly what we're going to dive into in this video. And at the end of this video, we will be doing the most Epic giveaway I've ever done in my entire career here on Epic Gardening, where we're giving away five custom painted Birdies garden beds and 35 copies of my book, Grow Back Gardening in partnership with Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and Strange Beast. So cultivate that Like button to up your chances of winning the giveaway by... Actually, I don't think I can give you... Legally, I don't think I can give you that blessing, but I will bless your raised beds with 20% more harvests and higher yields. And let's get into the video. The first thing to remember about growing in raised beds is that they really are unlockers of gardening potential. So there's a few cases where you really want to use them over growing in ground. In the space that we're looking at right now, probably right where this beautiful cabbage is, I had a crop of corn in the ground last summer when I first moved into this place, but I didn't do a great job of checking and scanning for the different weeds that were in the area. And I had a crazy amount of Bermuda grass just in this whole front yard. The backyard seems to be fine. I'm growing in ground back there. Seems fine. This front yard is absolutely atrocious and the corn just got taken over. Rather than spend a multi-year effort defeating the Bermuda, what I decided to do is pay homage to the old Epic garden. And in the first front yard section that you see of this whole house, let's just go in really tall raised beds so they can help avoid weeds. But if you're in a small space and you only have like a concrete spot or a patio, well then raised beds are pretty much the only way you can garden, right? You have to have some sort of container for the soil mix. So where you place your raised beds will be heavily determined on what you actually will gain from doing that. So if I was to put all my raised beds in the backyard, I wouldn't be getting much benefit because the soil's good and it's relatively non-weedy or the weeds that are there aren't that big of a deal. Whereas here, I'll just show you right now, it's pretty bad. So in this area we've cleared it out. It looks fine, right? No big deal. But as soon as you go over to the part that we've neglected, take a look. Look at all of that. That is what I would have to deal with if I was growing in ground. Not ideal. Which is why there's so many raised beds in this front yard. We're just hanging out. We're having a good time gardening and not a bad time dealing with all of this nonsense. One of the best benefits to growing in raised beds that a lot of people often forget is that you get to choose everything about how that plant grows. From where you place the bed itself, to the soil, to the nutrients within the soil, to just the strategy overall. So let's just take this strawberry bed for example. It's not super special, I would say. It's a pretty standard potting mix in here, but I did add a lot of Espoma's Berry Tone, which is slightly lowering the pH and also providing the strawberries specifically with the nutrients that they need to grow. I could go even more extreme and plant a whole bed of blueberries, for example. And that's going to want a really low soil pH that's going to be hard to get in the ground. It's just probably not natively what your soil is. It's 4.5 to 5 pH. Most soil sits somewhere around 6.5 to 7.5. So it's going to be hard to get it there. So you can make a custom bed with that exact soil mix. The other thing to think about is what if you have a perennial bed of, I don't know, asparagus. That's a 10, 20 year crop. It takes a few seasons just to get established and it can be somewhat finicky when it's dealing with weeds, especially early on. Well, if you know you're going to place a bed somewhere for quite some time, over a decade, then put it in a raised bed that's going to protect it from a lot of those pressures. Less weed pressure in here. It's easier to work in. You can come through in that asparagus bed and just pick weeds out and mulch it, do everything you can to get it established so it produces for many, many years to come. If you have a raised bed, you have some sort of structure that you're growing in and you can utilize that structure to maximize the production of your crops either by protecting them or by extending them a little bit. So take a look at this circular bed that I have here. This is the Birdies Round Tall. I've put a huge giant cabbage in. That's really looking beautiful. We've had a couple issues, but for the most part it's looking beautiful. This is the last cabbage that's in my garden, the last brassica. And we all know that those have a lot of different pest issues and I really want to protect this. So instead of having to row cover over a whole garden area or whatever, I can just throw a couple little bamboo stakes if I want or some PVC and then just put a floating row cover here and staple it. And I've protected this completely while still letting light come through and actually keeping the temp down just slightly, which the cabbage is going to like without having to affect all these other beds over here. Now a simple one back here on these peas, all I need to do is just throw a little trellis up on the side that's not going to shade out the rest of your garden. And boom, I have this beautiful, beautiful wall of peas, so to speak, that it's delicious. I mean, there's one right here I'm going to have a little bite and I didn't need to do too much there. And it's very, very simple to do. Now another thing that you can do is you can come up and let's say summer's coming, right? And I want to do some cucumbers. I want to do some gourds. I want to do maybe some beans or something like that. And I really want to extend their ability to grow and produce. But I don't really want to take up like all the space in this bed right here. What I could do is I could just throw a little cattle panel arbor, really cheap to do. Just take it, bend it, cut it to size. Good to go. Plant one over here, let it come up and let it come back down. And all the production of it is actually going to be in this void right here in the air that was completely unused otherwise. Let's go over here for a second and then take a look at maybe something that you're trying to push into summer. It's getting a little bit hot. Maybe it's going to suffer from some heat. Well, you do the same thing as we talked about in the cabbage. You just put some hoops over and you can do some shade cloth over this. And so as long as you've got a nice bed design, you can just make any sort of attachment to it that you want. The least of which is just drip irrigation. I don't have it set up here on this bed, but I have done a couple of videos on it and drip irrigation into a raised bed. You just run it up, flop it over, throw some drip tape down and boom, you have an automated watering system that you can hook up to like a wifi timer if you want to get that crazy. But there's so much you can do to extend the beds once you have them in place. In raised beds it's really helpful to think about theming each bed with a particular goal in mind, whether that be for the kitchen or just for the garden itself. So take this bed right here. There's chamomile, there's calendula. Behind the chamomile, which is pretty big, there's lavender. I see some basil. I've got sage, oregano, some of these Mediterranean herbs that all have the same care requirements. That's the important thing. These are things that can tolerate some drought. They don't like a lot of fertilizer. They want that soil to be loose and well draining. They want a decent amount of heat and full sun. Why not put them all in the same bed together? My care is going to be easier and they're all going to do much better. In the front yard pretty soon as summer approaches, I'll do a couple of different themed gardens. I'll probably do a salsa or pizza garden with tomatoes, onions, basil, and we'll do some peppers in there as well. Those are all quintessential summer crops that if I treat that whole bed the same, those, those crops are going to do just fine. Maybe cilantro would be the only little sleeper that doesn't really like the hot weather. But you know, for the most part, grouping by theme, whether that's the theme that you want to have in the kitchen or just the theme of care, they all have similar care requirements, is going to get you a lot better results. In this bed here, I have some soybean. I have edamame right here and then Capitano beans. Both bush beans, they want a decent amount of water and they don't want to dry out. And so let's talk about managing your water in your raised bed. The first thing of course is going to be mulching, right? So you want to protect the surface of that soil. But we've all heard it before many, many times on many, many videos. It's still very important, but it is a little bit of a classic tip. So what is this little thing, sort of alien looking thing hanging out in the middle of the bed? This is an ancient technology made new again. It is an olla. So this is something that you just bury in your soil. It's a terracotta pot with a thin shallow neck that what you want to do is just fill it up with water. You bury it in the soil. The water will eventually permeate the terracotta, touch the soil, and then it will go from wet soil to dry soil via wicking action, capillary action. So it's a great way to somewhat sub-irrigate a raised bed. So what I've done is I probably could have put one here and one here, but I want to, I don't have a lot of these. I want to conserve them. So I put one in the center. I fill it up every single time I give it a water. That doesn't mean I don't water this bed at all, but with two inches of mulch and an olla in the center that's radiating water out in about a two by two radius, I have to water this way, way less and my plants are a lot happier. So in the garden we have to prevent pests as effectively as we can. And we also want to enjoy our lives in the garden as much as we can too. So for me being pretty tall, but also if you're elderly, it's harder for you to move around or you're disabled in some way, a tall accessible bed has a benefit for you. I can come through and harvest a radish, take care of my cabbage, whatever I want to do while standing up instead of bending over and over many, many, many years, deteriorating my body a little bit more than I would want to. But also what can't get into a tall raised bed? Well, gophers are going to have a hard time. If you've watched my video on how to fill a tall raised bed, you know right about here or so, it's logs. Gophers aren't coming up through that. And I could even put hardware cloth down or landscape fabric if I wanted to, to really prevent any digging pest from below. But at the same time, a rabbit can't make it into a 30 inch tall bed. I've seen a squirrel get in, but only when it was jumping from something else. So if a squirrel somehow could get up on this green stalk and then jump in, it could get in. I have yet to see them be able to climb up the side of a bed that's around 30 inches tall or so. And then for your flying pests, like we mentioned before, you can easily cover a raised bed. But that's not the only thing I wanted to talk about in this front yard here. Take a look at these four beds right here. Now I'm not really a huge crop rotator, but if you do know for a fact, let's say that this bed right here, it was filled with tomatoes and you've got some blight issues that just are soil borne. It's a soil borne disease. You could just not plant tomatoes here and you could rotate them this way. So you could sort of counterclockwise rotate things like maybe you have your brassicas here, you've got your legumes, your beans and stuff right there. You've got your tomatoes and stuff right there. And then you have some flowers and you could just rotate it season by season. And I don't know, it just feels like it's a little bit easier to do that in a raised bed. It's easier to conceptualize and actually execute that crop rotation if it's something that you do. However, we now have to get to the most Epic giveaway of all time. We have to go into the backyard. We're giving away five Birdies beds and 35 copies of the Grow Bag Gardening book. So let's go back and I'm going to show you what we got. So here we have it. Five custom painted, original six in one Birdies raised beds that we're giving away to five of you here in the Epic Gardening community, just as a way to say thank you for all this incredible growth that we've seen over the last year or so. I'm super grateful. It's literally changed my entire life. And so I partnered up with Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and Strange Beach Kombucha, which is their Kombucha line. And we teamed up, we picked five San Diego local artists who just made these incredible murals, if you will, on the sides of these. So we're giving five of these away. Link is in the description. But runners up, there are going to be 35 runners up. I'm giving 35 copies of my book Grow Bag Gardening away. And actually hundreds more who didn't win either of those will also win something special that you'll see a little bit later. So it's just a way to say thank you. And I'm super grateful that we were able to do this. So link's in the description for that. Hope you enjoyed these raised bed tips. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.