How to Build a Vegetable Garden - Developing the soil - Episode 5

G'day, welcome to I Cultivate, my name's Steve. Today, we're going to be looking at how I developed this area here into a new, beautiful, vegetable garden bed. Now, it was my intention to do this garden bed using what is called the no-dig method, but as you can see here, we have got what is, in fact, the gardener's worst nightmare, a lot of nut grass, or in some places, you'll call it sedge grass. So, in fact, I'm going to have to do a bit of digging, even though, ultimately, I'm going to do, I suppose, what is traditionally called the no-dig method. So, first step in this particular garden preparation will be trying to deal as much as possible with this nut grass. Okay, so we've now got the nut grass mostly removed from this garden bed. If you have a look at the link that's going to appear on your screen now, it will take you to a video that is just about dealing with nut grass. But what we're going to now need to do is move on to the next stage of preparing this garden bed to actually be a productive vegetable garden. So, let's now get on to that next step. So, on to the next step now. I've been talking about what I've been referring to as a no-dig garden, but, of course, we've actually had to do a lot of digging to deal with the nut grass that's going on in this garden. But what I'm actually going to be doing, I suppose, is a variation of what's called the sheet mulching technique. Now, that means, essentially, we're going to lay down layers of this cardboard over this area, and then, on top of that, we're going to be putting a whole heap of different layers of organic material that are ultimately going to compost down into what will end up forming our garden soil. So, before I go putting down the cardboard, what I'm going to do with this soil here is add a number of materials that will help in the long run. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add lime. Now, the reason for adding lime is to sweeten this soil, and, amongst other things, what that's going to do is to help deal with the nut grass. Nut grass likes a slightly acidic soil, so if I sweeten this, I've got my fingers crossed that that might contribute towards preventing the nut grass from coming through. But, of course, if it does, we're going to be able to deal with that, I hope, easily. The second thing that we're going to add here is some blood and bone. Now, the whole idea of blood and bone is that will help, apart from adding nutrients to the soil, it will help to activate worm activity. It'll encourage worms into the soil and to get them working the soil. And the third thing that we're going to add to this area here is some gypsum, because we do have some clay in this particular soil, and I'm hoping that that gypsum will help with the breaking up of the clay and helping with any compaction that might occur in this area. So let's get those three things added to this soil before we add the cardboard layer. So we've now got our layer of cardboard down over this garden bed. I want to point out a couple of things about the cardboard. And firstly, you will find that with a lot of cardboard packaging you'll get, it will have packing tape and things like that, plastic tapes. Make sure you remove those plastic tapes from the cardboard before you lay them down. And one other thing that I want to mention is you can see cardboards like this one, many of them have got a plastic coating on the outside of the cardboard, or even with many fruit trays, you'll find there's a waxy coating. Don't use those cardboards. Make sure that it is just a plain cardboard like you can see we've got here in the garden bed. A couple of final things about the cardboard is, firstly, just remember to make sure that you have all of the gaps covered. So that might mean you end up with two, maybe even three layers of the cardboard, but don't worry, it will eventually, of course, compost down. If you don't want to use cardboard, another option is newspaper, although that is increasingly becoming more difficult to access. If you do use newspaper, you're probably going to want at least five, maybe six layers of newspaper or newspaper sheets over the area. So you'll need quite a bit, depending upon the size of your area. Following on from the cardboard, we get a nice thick layer of straw or hay mulch over this entire area. We need it to be nice and thick so that we get that beautiful composting action starting to happen underneath all the other materials that we're going to add on top of this. Remember, this is multi-layered and this is just following on from the cardboard, the next layer. So a good thick layer of this straw. Now that we've got this layer of straw down across our garden bed, it's really important that we get in amongst all of this straw, lots of manure. Now this is a blend of sheep and cow manure, but I'm also going to be adding chicken manure, well-aged chicken manure to all of this. So what I will do is I'll spread this manure around over the top of and through the straw. And this will help with the activation of the composting and also it will help with future worm development as well in this soil. The next layer that we need to add to this garden soil is a layer of compost. Now I'm going to use two different types of composts. This one here, which is a beautiful load of mushroom compost is going to be the first layer. And then I'm going to follow that with another layer of just normal garden compost. And there we have it. We've got our garden soil now all ready to go. It's actually ready to plant out, but I reckon we might leave that until tomorrow. It's been a big day. So what we will do now is we'll cover it up with a tarpaulin in order to protect it from the wildlife that likes to come in and scratch around after all. That's why we actually have built this structure to protect the garden from those animals. So I think that will do for today. I really hope you've been able to get something out of this video and have enjoyed watching what we have done with regards to this sheet mulching method for the preparation of this garden bed. So can I please ask you to go down to the thumbs up and give us a thumbs up, subscribe to our channel and go to our website, iCultivate.net and become a member of the community. Thanks for watching.