Building a Raised Bed Kitchen Herb Garden Out the Back Door

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the price of just a handful of herbs from the supermarket has skyrocketed. They say it's got something to do with inflation and politicians. Sorry, I didn't mean to use two swear words this early in the video. G'day, I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me and besides inflation, which is a good reason to grow your own food, including herbs, there are two other main reasons why I set up our new kitchen herb garden right out the back door of our home here. And one reason was to clean up this awful garden mess. And the other reason was to bring some of those herbs that we access a lot much closer to the kitchen so that we could grab them easier when we wanted them for a meal. No more venturing out into the middle of the backyard in rain, hail or shine to get the herbs that we need. So in this video, I'm gonna show you a bit of a garden makeover on how we made these raised herb garden beds. And then after that, we're gonna have some fun planting out a whole bunch of different herbs and spices that I'll have ready to go in there. Let's get into it. Now, as you probably know, we have plenty of room for herbs in our main garden and in fact, all around our property. It's amazing how convenience plays such an important role in food gardening. Maybe not so much ornamental, but definitely food because you don't wanna be putting yourself out too much, especially if you've got a busy life, you've come home from work and you wanna grab some quick herbs to maybe flavor a rice or something. And then you find yourself having to tredge down the backyard, possibly in the pouring rain or at nighttime to try to find a handful of herbs. Well, I totally understand that. And at times, even though I've been a big foodie growing our own herbs and spices for over a decade now, I still get those times when you just wish you could just walk out the back door, grab a handful of herbs and then go upstairs and flavor your food. Where'd you go? Oh, yeah. So what I was saying is we've got plenty of herbs out there and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring some of them in closer so that we can have that easy access. And I've got some purchased ones as well to save me a bit of time that I'll plant in here too. Before we put these beds in, we had to refurbish and clean up this area. And we had two horrible garden beds in here. And even though we thought we were doing the right thing by planting certain ornamentals in here to make it look pretty, it just wasn't doing it for us. We had rosemary either side, but they had been dying back and are getting very old and woody. So they needed changing. We had an old passion fruit trellis here that did okay. And on the left of me, we've got a grapevine that I created as a cutting. And that grapevine ended up the only thing that we wanted to keep. The rest just had to go. I don't know if you saw my tomato video growing in a mound. We were trying to fix our shed from getting flooded. We dug a whole lot of soil out and re-sculptured the land to make the drainage better. We were in the process of shifting that soil and also doing some extra landscaping when I thought it'd be a good opportunity to use that machinery and the guys to create this kitchen garden. Because obviously if you've got a machine that can load soil into a garden bed, it's gonna be able to be done much quicker. So we got the backhoe to clean out that area. And at the same time, we started building the garden beds. Now these garden beds, I actually got them cut to size. I've measured out the area that I wanted and I ordered them online to a specific size or as close as I could get to the size that I wanted. The one on the left here or your right is just over four meters long. It's about 4.1. And the one on the left here is 3.8 meters long. They are standard AluZinc Birdies garden beds, the thin ones, because a herb garden doesn't necessarily have to be humongous. And we didn't want any big, large garden beds up there. We just wanted a thin profile because we thought it would look better as well as not be needed as much anyway because it's a herb garden. But having said that, I am gonna be growing a few veggies in there because I just can't help myself, but I'm gonna keep those veggies down in number and make sure they don't overgrow that space too much. Oh no, one's longer than the other. Yeah, that one's there. Sorry. When we went to put the raised garden bed in where the grapevine was, we noticed that the stem went right in to where we wanted to put the garden bed because we wanted to flush that bed nicely up against the concrete so that there wasn't any gaps for weeds and grasses to grow through. And of course, it just looked neater. So instead of trying to dig the grapevine up, we thought we would just dig out a hole in the garden bed, let the grapevine happily grow underneath it. We left a little bit of space for that stem to expand. And I think it's gonna work a treat. When it came to the filling of the beds, you can see now that that big pile is gone. And of course, where did it go? Well, into those beds. Before we did that though, all that organic matter and garden waste that was scraped out to level those beds off, that was all put back into the base of these beds. As you know, I love organic matter in the base of raised garden beds for a number of really good reasons that I've outlined in plenty of videos before. It's the hugelkultur type concept. So we first put that into the base of the beds and then the backhoe put all that dirt into these raised garden beds. And we had them filled within about 15 minutes. It was the fastest time I've ever filled a raised garden bed in my life. I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't mind manual labor, but there was a saying when I was in the army and it went, why do it hard when you can do it easy? So I let the bed settle for about a week. And that one over there has sunk more than this one. But as you can see this one here, I've already put a layer of mulch on there. And it's not just mulch. I also used ocean to earth fish compost made from real fish, salvaged from down the boat ramps south of Sydney. And I used several packets of that just to zhuzh up that topsoil so that when I do plant the herbs in, they're gonna have plenty of nutrients to give them a good start. And on top of that, I put a little bit of sugar cane mulch. Nina also put out these ornaments in the garden. She loves those garden ornaments. I don't know, I'll probably keep them in the herb garden, do you think? Well, I better do what the boss says, otherwise I might get in trouble. So I am gonna give this bed a top up because it has sunk more than this other one did. It's gonna sink again anyway. Don't worry about that. All these garden beds tend to sink over time, no matter what. Come in closer. Check out this spot here. Got this mass of tomatoes coming up. And yep, you guessed it, that was from those tomatoes in that pile there. First of all, it's weird that these guys actually had a chance to come up at all. And then secondly, this isn't the time of year that tomatoes should be growing, but we've had this unusually cool summer and the tomatoes are loving it. These tomatoes are growing very strong and it's not just tomatoes. We've got this here. It's a Kirkabit of some sort. I'm pretty sure it's not a cucumber, but I think it's a pumpkin. It could be a zucchini, but I don't know what it is. And I know this is a herb garden, but I just can't help myself. I need to grow at least one or two of these plants and I will probably transplant the majority of these and just keep one, maybe two as leaders. Keep them very small, tidy and trimmed so they don't overshadow the other herbs and plants that I'm putting in here, but also this area. I don't want this area to be huge, big and bushy. I want it to be a petite, nice herb garden. So let's quickly finish this garden bed off. Also have to get rid of some of the weeds here. And then we will start planting out. I'm just leaving a little bit of a hill. That way it'll allow for some sinkage at least and it won't sink too fast on me and be too low in a couple of months. It'll still allow for a bit of sinkage. Of course, using your own compost is by far preferred, but this is also very good commercial stuff and a good cause as well. Okay, so that's that bed refurbished and done. Now I will don on the hat and we'll get to going around, finding all the herbs we want to plant out into these two garden beds. By the way, that shirt, the really loud one that I was wearing, it's a full length gardening shirt that is gonna be merch in the future. We're working on getting that on our website soon. So keep an eye out for that. And this hat as well. Been trialing it for a while now and it's pretty cool, literally. So yeah, keep an eye out for those things. Let's get these herbs and start planting them out. Now I also did have some mint here, but I'm not gonna put it in there. We've already got enough. If I need to get mint for mojitos, I'll come down to the garden because I just don't want it to invade that whole garden bed and take out all those other herbs, which it will. I also have some rosemary here. I took these cuttings from our old rosemary. I'm trying to root them now. So hopefully they'll take root and then I'll plant them again on either side of the pathway in those raised garden beds. But this time I'm gonna keep them hedged and small and nice and bushy so they don't get too old, leggy and woody. I will leave a couple of gaps either side for this to go in later on. And apart from the rosemary being on either side of the pathway, I haven't really got any rhyme or reason on where I'm going to plant the rest of these herbs. You can never have enough garlic chives. And in here, there's also a native basil that is really pungent. I don't like it, to be honest. It's terrible. But I suppose if you are really desperate, you could use it. I might leave it growing there with the scenes that it's already in there with the chives, but we'll see. If it gets too out of control, I'll pull it out. I've been growing this in the pot for quite a long time. As you can see, it'll be loving to be planted out finally in here. And why not put some society garlic next to it? Thankfully, it's not as big. Tease those roots out. A lot of these have been in containers just waiting for this project, probably too long. I've got quite a bit of Vietnamese mint. It's not as invasive as regular mint. In fact, I found it quite difficult to grow, to be honest. More Vietnamese mint, more of the pink society garlic. I'll put that next to the other ones. And I think I'll stick a little bit of parsley next to this tomato plant here. This is the Italian flat leaf variety. It's not the curly parsley. And since I'm going Italian in this area, I might as well put the basil in here next to the parsley. It might not go too well. It's starting to look a little bit too leggy. I might give it a trim back later. But anyway, we'll see how it goes. And I've got a few other small little basil plants here as well. I think this is the Greek small leafed basil. Just stick it in here. These don't grow for very long. Let it go to seed and then replant the seeds. And you know what? I think I'll plant some oregano right down the end just to keep that Italian theme going. Didn't realize that spider was on there. Nasty fella. I'll just plant it in this corner once I get rid of this big ugly looking thing here. Go on, bugger off. Go on, I hate spiders. Yuck. I'd rather snakes any day. Okay, yeah, I'll put the oregano here. It'll get a little bit of shelter from the harsh sun. And it should grow well in this corner. Like I said, if this is a pumpkin, which I think it is, I'm not gonna let it go too out of control. I might let it grow one pumpkin if I can and that's it. Let's finish this other side off here with some marjoram. Italian and Greek. It's only a small pot. Nice and cheap to buy. Should grow into a good plant, hopefully. Kind of a cousin of oregano. So apart from the rosemary, that's that bed finished off. A little bit of a European theme, Italian, Greek kind of thing. I'm not going too themey. And on this side, of course, I'm gonna leave a gap here for the rosemary on this side. And then here I'm gonna plant some chives, some store-bought ones, and other ones that I grew from seed myself. They're a bigger variety. Some of that society garlic, but the white flowering type. Some sage. This is a pineapple sage that I've never grown before. Some lovage because I think I'll love it. And some coriander. A chili. This is an African chili. It's a hot type, but it's a good flavor. And then on the end here, it's a native Australian turmeric and some lemongrass right on the end. That should be nice. And it won't get in the way and overpower the whole bed if I leave it in that spot and keep it trimmed down. So yeah, without even really thinking about it, it's a kind of Asian theme in this raised bed. There we go. Now, before watering in, I'm just gonna give these plants a little bit of a soak here with some seaweed tonic. Simple as this. Nine liter watering can. Give it about a dash or so. This is concentrated stuff. I'll give these another proper water in after they get this in their guts. Just a little bit of a sip each just to help with the transplant shock. Nothing over the top. And when I do the second watering with the normal hose, that'll just spread it around even more. That's the little dribble each. Okay, now just a final watering. And I do this to make sure that the plants get a good drink of water. This is summer. And the other thing is it settles the roots down. Makes them grow faster and better and recover better. A real good soaking in. Yeah, there's sun coming out. It's a pretty good day today, but I tell ya, it can get very harsh. And if you don't water your plants in properly, well, you're setting them up for failure right from the beginning because they'll be stressed trying to establish. The seaweed tonic, that helps take that stress away a little bit and gives them also a little bit of a feed. But watering in is probably the most important thing to do. Make sure those roots are settled, like I said. And they've got enough to drink to get them by, especially in the hot weather. Well, there's just one more other thing that I need to do. Otherwise I'll get in trouble. The frog here, maybe the cat. Cat in amongst, well, there's no pigeons, in amongst the society garlic. And the one-eyed fish with Nemo in here. Oh, nice. Nina should be very happy. There's another thing. See this tank behind me here? It's about a thousand litre tank, that's my guess. Well, I am gonna find a way to be able to use that tank to somehow water these garden beds. I don't know how I'm gonna do it yet. I've got a few things in mind, but I'll probably bring that to you in another video. Well, in the end, I'm really happy with how this kitchen herb garden project turned out. If you can remember what it did look like, which was a complete schmuzzle, we've left it overgrow. It didn't look very appealing, but more than that, it was bad on the eye and no use to us. But now it's good on the eye, I think you'll agree. And it's useful because it's a food garden. It's herbs that we can use for our own cooking. They're convenient and easy to get. And that's what I love about food gardening and this type of raised bed gardening as well. It's easy to garden in. You'll find that those beds will fill out and I'll also plant more herbs in there. So as those plants grow, it'll look even better. Most of all, I just love cooking with herbs and this is such a convenient way to do it when it's right out your back door. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, make sure you give it a really big, fantastic kitchen herb garden thumbs up. Share the video around because this really helps my channel out heaps. Subscribe if you haven't already and look out for that merch because that'll be coming. Thanks a lot for watching. Bye for now. Cheers.