KIDDIE POOL VEGETABLE GARDEN - Week 1: Site Setup & Soil Preparation | Container Gardening | DIY

Hello crafty family it's Dee and I'm coming to you today to bring the very first kiddie pool gardening video in my kiddie pool gardening series. About a month ago I conducted a poll to see if my viewers would like to see me prep and grow my kiddie pool garden. Well about 92 percent of you said yeah you would be interested so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for me to present this to you guys. So this year I'm getting ready to start my garden and I wanted to document the step-by-step process so you guys can follow along with me. So this video today is going to be all about site preparation. We're going to prepare the site, we're going to prepare the tools, we're going to prepare the soil. So we want to get everything ready before we actually start planting and I have some of my plants here I haven't planted yet but we're going to start getting site preparation which is very important. I'll go over some of the tools we're going to use some of the cheap tricks that I kind of incorporated into that maybe you may not have thought of but yes if you're the type of person that doesn't have a whole lot of time to invest in gardening this may be for you because it's practically like no maintenance. So I'm going to show you how to set up a self-watering irrigation system and everything it's going to be so much fun but I do look forward to it. So I am just so excited you guys I'm so excited to bring this to you. I want to welcome back to my current DIY subscribers and listen you will still receive those two DIY projects a week we'll just have gardening on Sunday so I'm just very excited that we'll do that. So if you have a busy lifestyle but you still want to grow your own garden this video is for you. So now without further ado let's jump into that garden. Okay guys here is the current status of my garden now this is how I left it at the end of October of 2019. After my garden stops producing I go ahead and just let it just go dormant and of course there's lots of weeds there's lots of overgrowth there's some dead plants but this is how it's left so we are going to be working today to get this back in order because honestly this is a hot mess but we are going to work it out. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by removing all of the bags that I plant my plants in from each one of the pools. Now once those bags are removed I'm going to go ahead and take my pools off to the side and I'm going to give them a good cleaning because while they've been sitting there of course they've got debris, pine straw, dirt and we want a nice fresh start so we're going to get those ready. So I just set these up and I am going to start rinsing them out with a water hose removing all of that debris that's accumulated over the past several months while it's been sitting dormant and then I'm going to take just this brush this is a bottom of a push brush the handle broke a while back but being handy I just kept it and I thought I could use it to clean my pools with so I am just giving them a nice good scrub releasing that dirt and build up over the months and I'm going to do this for all of the pools and then finally I'm just going to go ahead and rinse all of that buildup off. I tell you what these pools are excellent every year they look brand new but they sit out in the weather every year and they still look great. So after the insides are nice and clean I'm just going to flip them over to the back and give the back side of them a quick rinse. Now by the way I did purchase these pools from Target about four years ago they were about nine dollars in the off season and they have held up very well. So back to our planting pad I'm going to first start by removing all of the water hoses that I had laid out and then I'm going to take a small rake and I'm going to start cleaning up the area. Now there's a lot of weeds, overgrowth, dirt, debris maybe some algae things like that so we're going to start cleaning that up. Now a few days before I did start this I did go around this area with a little bit of weed killer so it made it a little easier to pull up all of that overgrowth that happened around the pool. So I'm just going to rake that all up into a pile and I am just going to throw it in my refuse bin. Now once that's all raked up I'm just going to take my water hose and I am going to give the the pad where I plant all my um where I place my garden I'm going to give it a nice good rinse and this way you could remove all of the buildup some of the leaves and some of the grass kind of sticks to it and this is just a landscaping fabric that I have down. I have a nice thick landscaping fabric. Invest in a very good quality landscaping fabric if you decide to use it. I have gone on my third year with this particular fabric and it has held up well and I purchased it from Lowe's. So now that everything is all cleaned off we can take our pools and we can place them back on our gardening pad. So now what I'm going to start doing is preparing my soil. So I do apologize I didn't get a close-up of this but I'll explain to you what I am doing here. What I'm doing is I'm taking a like a little hand fork style tool and I am removing all of the weeds and the grassy overgrowth that happened inside of the planting bags. So you want to kind of dig down and not only want to just get the surface but you also want to get a lot of the roots and things like that that may be deeper into the soil. Now to replenish my soil I will be using this Miracle-Gro Moisture Control Potting Mix. I really like this and it helps my plants out a lot. I'll also be using some of this Premier Peat Moss and this is to help my plants with some moisture retention especially over the hot months. And to replenish the nutrients I'll be using this Miracle-Gro Shake and Feed. I really like this it's convenient and I'll be using this in my soil when I mix it all up and prepare it for planting. So now that my soil in my bags is all weeded I'm going to take each one of the bags and I'm going to dump it out into my wheelbarrow. Now I'm not going to be reusing these bags because I mean there's really no need to reuse them. They've been sitting and they've been sun warped and you know they become a little brittle from being out in the weather so one year use is just fine. Now I'm gathering up my tools and I have a shovel I have a long fork and I also have a pointed hoe in my collection here and I'm also grabbing up my peat moss in my soil and my fertilizer. So the first thing I want to do is kind of chop up that soil really well remove any additional things that might be in it pine cones leaves anything that might be bulky we want to make sure we removed all of those roots as well. Now once we complete that I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to start off with adding my Miracle-Gro feeding granules and I'm just going to generously sprinkle amount in there about a quarter of the container in there and then I'm going to put the Miracle-Gro soil it's about maybe two or three shovels full and then I'm just using the remainder of a bag that I had and I'm also going to put a couple of shovels of this peat moss into the mix as well. So I call this seasoning my soil. Okay so what I'm going to do is kind of mix everything together blend it well make sure that all of your ingredients are blended well so when you start to put them in the bags that they'll each have an equal amount. So what I like to use to plant are these Walmart reusable bags. Now these are like a polypropylene type of material and they absorb liquid very well. They're only 50 cents from Walmart so these are a great deal. I've seen grow bags but grow bags are kind of expensive and these work fantastic. I use them for an entire year and just discard them and buy new ones the next year. They work perfect and I highly recommend them. So what I want to do is start filling each bag with the soil. Now it depends on what you're planting in that soil is how much soil you want to put in your bag. For this particular pool here I will be planting some tomatoes so I want to have it at least three quarters of the way full because tomato bushes tend to get about five feet so I want to make sure that those bags are nice and filled so they won't tilt over. Now you notice the soil was taken from the pool behind it and I'm putting in the front pool. I like to rotate my soil around so if I grow tomatoes in soil one year I'll grow something different and rotate it to a different pool the next year and I'd like to keep that rotation going. So I filled five bags of soil for my tomato plants and I usually have about five varieties it just depends on you know what's available at the time. So now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to repeat this process for the remainder of the pools with the weeding of the bags mixing of the soil and just making sure that everything is filled properly. Now you want to make sure you also rotate your soil if you're using soil for a previous type of plant before you want to make sure you rotate the soil as well. Now this last pool is in the back is usually for my zucchini plants. Now if you've grown zucchini before zucchini is fairly large so I'm only going to fill about four bags for this pool and now that all the bags are filled I have a little extra soil left so I'm just going to go and fill in all the extra soil in any of the bags that may be looking a little sparse so I just want to make sure I use all those yummy ingredients in the soil for the plants and here is everything ready so now I'm going to put my hoses back. Now what I have here is I have a four-way splitter so I have a main line coming in and I have a splitter going to four different hoses so what this does is each one of the hoses will go to one of the pools so what happens is when I can't water I usually run this line to the house with a timer and I will have it water on its own and I will be getting more in detail in that and later down the line but I'm going to make sure I just go ahead and set this up now I'm going to make sure at least one hose is wrapped around each pool and then you know when I get to the point where I'm about to use them I'll put the end of the hose in the pool so when the timer goes off each pool will be replenished with water. Now the green hose runs to the house to the main line or your timer so I'm right now we're not hooking it up to the water source so we're just going to go ahead and roll this up and get this out of the way so I'm just going to sit this right next to the kiddie pools. Now here's a close-up of that splitter it has four lines and it has a shutoff valve for each line in case you want one pool not to get water I tend to leave mine open at all times because you just never know and also I have drilled a one inch hole about two inches from the bottom on each pool so in case it rains the pool will not flood so this is a definite idea that you need to do you do not want your pools filling up with water in case we get heavy rains so the water will overflow when it reaches that level. And here are all of our pools ready to go now if you want to choose seed to plant you can plant directly in the bags if you want to and I preferred seedlings and and small plants that I like to purchase but it's completely up to you whatever you want to do but all the soil is ready it's fertilized and you can go ahead and start your planting now we will be doing this in the next video but this video just outlines the setup and what we are about to do and here is everything set up I'm just ready to go here I can't wait to plant so I will be shopping for seedlings and getting everything ready and we are going to be good to go once we get those things listen if you enjoy this tutorial please give this video a thumbs up and make sure you subscribe I will see you all next time!