How to Perfectly Pest-Proof a Raised Bed

What do you do if you've got a raised bed and you have gophers, deer, voles, birds, whatever the case may be? How do you actually protect a raised bed? Well, in this video, we're going to show you our ultimate solution for protecting a raised bed from every single type of pest. So the first thing you want to do is really it's about placement initially. I know that this particular area has some gophers. Oh yeah. I know we've got raccoons that come through, skunks and opossums, let alone, you know, your birds and all your other pests. So if you can, you just want to avoid that. But we can't here. I need to put asparagus in. This is the area that we've chosen. And so the first thing you want to do is just prep the land. So I have the bed laid out here. This is actually a combined version of our Birdies 8-in-1 bed. We put two together and put some bracing kits on. Cool little system. But the first thing we want to do Jacques is just move this out of the way, level the soil, and then we'll get to our triple threat bottom prep. We'll just pop it down here real quick. I'm going to dig out a little bit of this Bermuda that I see on the edges. Yeah. It's a good time as you're leveling to just take the weeds out that you do see, especially something like a Bermuda grass, which can be pretty gnarly. We're going to protect from it, but why not remove it if you're leveling the soil out anyways. And I like using the back of my rake a lot of times for stuff like this. It's pretty nice. I think this is an underrated part of bed setup because the aesthetics do to me matter a lot in the garden. And if something's nice and level, it just really helps with the whole look and feel of your garden. We think it's level. We're going to do a quick test fit and then we'll just adjust from there with a level. Yeah, we're a little off right now, but it's okay because we need to lay down the first part of the triple threat bottom prep, which is going to be the landscape fabric. Part one is going to be something very classic in the garden that we typically don't use a lot of, but it certainly can help, especially if you have a really gnarly weed. So that's just landscape fabric. So what we're going to do is I'll have Jacques grab one side of it here. We'll just roll it out like this across our whole bed area. And we'll actually go a little bit further just to make sure that we have good overlapping. I'll come all the way out. I'm actually going to grab a stake Jacques and... Yeah, I'll get this corner. ...stake down the corners before I cut it. And then when you put down your next roll, you don't match it up perfectly with the edge. You overlap it by at least six inches or so. So we'll come in and just map that to about there. Let's bring it over just a little more Jacques. Okay. Right about there. It looks good. And what I'm going to do now is pin down just a little bit in the middle here. I'm going to toss that one there. Yeah, perfect. Great. And for good measure, because we're not sure if this is exactly the size of the bed, we'll just do one more layer right over here. Yeah, we can do a pretty aggressive overlap here. Yeah, that's probably good. Oh, awesome. Pretty much right. Exactly what we needed. Our landscape layer is down. Next up is what's called hardware cloth. It is not a cloth at all. It's actually a metal mesh. This is half inch hardware cloth. Don't know why it's named that. It's actually very misleading. But what we want to do is basically the same exact process, cutting and overlapping. And we're using the Felco CP Clippers. You can just use any sort of tin snip as well, but this one's great because it makes its way through some plant material, but also it'll destroy this hardware cloth. So let's unwrap this and get this going. Our hardware cloth is down. That is going to be preventing pretty much all of your digging pests. Now this is not a stainless steel hardware cloth. You could certainly go that route. And in fact we probably want to develop something like that at Epic Gardening because galvanized is strong and it's going to last for years. But eventually it probably will rust out and maybe then you'll have some, some digging issues. But this is going to prevent your gophers, your voles, your moles for many, many years. The final step in a triple threat bottom prep is just cardboard. So I have some Ram board here actually left over from an old project. Jacques, we've got, I think of old cardboard frame box or something like that. It doesn't really matter. The whole point here is just one final layer of protection that is pretty much free. So let's just do the same exact process. This one we're not going to stake down. We're just going to lay flat and then place it on the bed. Only thing left to do now is to place the bed. And if it's not level, we can always shore it up with a little soil on top. Our bed's in place. There's one quick note I want to make. If you're working with a wooden bed, especially for the landscape fabric and the hardware cloth, a good idea is to flip your bed upside down and actually just staple it directly to the bottom, which we did with our herb bed over there. But since this is a metal bed, you just overlap slightly and you can cover the rest with mulch. Now we've protected the bottom. We need to protect the top from, for us, things like cabbage moths. But certainly if you're in an area with deer or with other flying pests, then here's what we're going to do. We have some conduit. This is three quarter inch electrical conduit, which you can get pretty much anywhere in the world where you are. And then Jacques got a special little box here of... This is a conduit maker pipe kit. So the idea of this is that you could build whatever structure you want with these fittings that are in the spot. Yeah. So what we're going to do now is because again, it's a metal bed, you could do this with a wood bed too, but specifically with these birdies, you can actually screw it directly to the bolts. So we're going to undo some of these bolts. We'll start cutting this up and show you exactly how we do it. So the first thing I'm going to do is remove the first and probably fourth bolt just to get a little bit of leverage there. Make sure that we're not doing anything too crazy. For the height of the conduit, are we thinking like five feet? I think about five feet up. So however low we go plus five feet on top of that, right? So we'll go about here and then we'll go up a little bit. Okay. Yeah. I see. If you have filled a bed up and you're sort of retrofitting, you can actually just dig down and install it this way. But the beauty of the maker pipe kit and the conduit sort of setup is you could even just build it outside your bed, use some rebar to stake it into the ground. And you could make perhaps a shade cloth. I mean, the flexibility of a kit like this is really second to none. Yeah. I mean, there's so many different ways you can approach it. Like up front, we actually have it on rebar outside the bed. Looks like Bobca wants to watch you Jacques. Bobca is not a pest, but, uh, she'll be out of this bed as well. Perfect. Just that easy. So while you're cutting Jacques, I am going to go ahead and install. Perfect. So the way that the beds go together in this particular case is just a bolt and a nut, right? So all we're going to do is on the interior, we're going to sandwich one of these right here, and then we're going to put the nut on. So it's actually quite simple. You just want to make sure that you decide which way you want it to be and map that on every single one. I'm just going to loose fit it. Then I'll put my conduit in and I'm mapping the bottom edge directly to the bottom of that last one there. So I'm getting all the height out of it. I can. So we have our uprights done, but now we need to create the frame and there's a kind of a clever little way to do it. Yeah. So these little corner pieces here, the way this works is that there's an outer part and the inner part and two bolts. And so what happens is you can slip this on over the top of your edge pieces. And I just have it on loose so that I could kind of visualize how I'm going to set this up. So that creates a perfect 90 degree angle. So we can take this piece and I'll tie in this more as we do it. But basically this will sit in here. It'll tie in on. Yeah. And then we can put another piece there, cut it, and we'll have a nice, rigid frame. Yep. And then if we wanted to, we could even split it in half and throw another line down this way. If you wanted to, there's all sorts of different connectors. You can actually use this as a string trellis. In fact, Jock at your garden. You've done this, but you could cover, but instead you decided to use more of a string trellis and then another trellis on the other side. You could even do both. You could do both. Yeah. So it's very flexible. It's very cool. But for the purposes of pest removal, you'll see what we're building here is the ability to block off the top of the bed. So let's get all these fixtures in place and get onto it. Instead of measuring this to the exact right dimension, it's easier to just put it in one side. And then we're going to come in with a marker. And what you want to do is you want to get on the other, the inside of where that bolt is. So it doesn't have to be exact because there's quite a lot of space inside there. So I'm going to go in right there. I don't know if that marked. That felt like it marked. And then I'll go ahead and cut that to size. The only thing left to do is just put the cross beams in. We're going to do these at 49 inches. But of course, when you're designing the system, whatever bed you are doing, the depth of that is pretty much what you want to cut those to. Yep. So the basic frame is done. And as we fill this bed up with soil, Jacques and I are going to talk about the, about three or four different toppings that you can add to the system. It really depends on the type of pest that you're dealing with. So for us, what we really want to think about is if you've got birds, then bird netting might be a good option. If you have flying pests plus you have a heat problem, then shade cloth is going to be a good option. If you have frost as an issue, you can go with frost cover because frost cover is going to prevent all your flying insects as well. The only thing I would caution against is if you do something like a bird netting, you end up running into this issue where smaller insects can get through. And if it's not really far away from your plants, even birds can land and kind of get in. And so I think I would typically recommend a shade cloth or a frost cover. One or the other is going to be your best bet. They give you some good ventilation too. I mean, if you want to get, if you have things like rats and it's a serious battle, then you could also consider putting hardware cloth around this. You can do that using either clips or just zip ties or wire. So as we fill this up, I'm going to show you how we did it out in the front yard with our San Juan Cabistrano giant cabbage. But this is the way to pretty much prevent any pest from getting into your garden. Remember, we triple lined the bottom and then we've created a frame on the top. So you can basically prevent whatever you want, even deer so long as you're using a good enough cover here. So as we fill this bed up, hopefully this was helpful. Let us know what you want to see next down in the comments. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.