How to Fill Raised Garden Beds Cheap and Easy

What's going on growers? It's James Frisione coming to you live from Jersey. Today I'm going to show you how to easily fill a raised garden bed for cheap. That will kick out more food than you ever thought possible. Let's go. I have been growing in raised beds for years and in my opinion it's the easiest most effective way for backyard gardeners to grow a garden that produces massive consistent harvests. After you have your garden bed built if it's wood or assembled if it's metal the big question is how the heck do we fill it and with what? If you get a deep bed like this one and try to fill the whole thing with quality soil it would be so expensive and also a waste because most annuals only need about 12 to 14 inches of quality soil. If you try to fill the whole base of it with native soil that will likely ruin your drainage because native soil is most times just too dense and what can happen is it could rain and the whole thing could fill up like a bucket and then no air would be able to get into the soil. The soil could go anaerobic and that would potentially kill the roots of your plants. Fortunately there's a few free convenient ways to fill the bottom of our beds which will aid in drainage, improve the soil over time and add organic matter which will help massively with water retention. After we fill our beds we'll get into what soil is best and I'll also show you how to prep your beds for planting but before we do that let's get into the free highly beneficial way to turn wasted space into a wicking water battery. I have a few different effective techniques which have worked great for me over the years. The first one is where we take logs, preferably rotted ones because they're lighter and will be more effective for water retention sooner and place them at the bottom of our raised bed. You can use logs that aren't rotted as well. One year I had to remove an old pear tree and I used those logs to fill the base of my bed but they'll take longer to get the full beneficial effect that you get from rotted logs. The deeper your bed the more logs you can add. For this bed it's almost three feet tall so I filled the first foot and a half or so with rotted logs. I know this method works because I've done it in the past with this bed right here. Then after a few years I went and dug up the logs that I buried. The logs that I dug up had turned into sponges and held water. When I squeezed them water would pour out and some of the logs even had roots growing in them. The plants were able to access moisture from the logs when needed and the logs also helped keep the bed hydrated by wicking up water during the dry season. After that you can add some smaller sticks or some composted garden material. What we want to do is have a layer of organic matter that will break down a bit quicker to help feed our soil organisms. Quick note, we want to make sure we're not adding a bunch of green and brown material into our bed and then burying it during the spring at this time of year. What we don't want to do is like take a bunch of grass clippings and a bunch of leaves and then bury them because what will happen is the composting process will be initiated and the bacteria needs water in order for that composting to happen. So that water will essentially be getting robbed from the roots of your plants in order for the composting to happen. If you want to do this in the fall and then allow the composting process to happen through the winter that's a different story. After adding smaller sticks or composted garden scraps or whatever you have around we can add a layer of poor soil. I use old compost I have laying around that may have mixed with my native soil or even old soil that I used for growing in containers that has roots in it still. The point of this layer of soil is to fill any gaps between the logs. This way when we put our quality soil in it doesn't just sink down the first time we water. To help with this I like to jump into the bed and compact the soil down as much as I can with my feet. Now we only have about 12 to 14 inches of the bed to fill instead of almost three feet. What if you don't have access to rotted logs or if you aren't able to lift a bunch of heavy logs and place them into your bed? Well I have an easily accessible free alternative that works just as well. I'm talking about woodchips. Ideally you want to use rotted woodchips or woodchips that have sat for a year or so. If you use fresh woodchips with leaves in them they can start to compost down and will rob your plants roots of water. Not to mention fresh woodchips will break down more than rotted ones will and if you use them in your bed they'll work but the soil level will sink down more than if you use rotted woodchips. For this raised bed right here I filled the whole bottom of it with woodchips. I filled it scoop by scoop and although it took a good amount overall it was much easier than lifting heavy logs and having to reach into the center of the bed and place them. The woodchips will give us very similar benefits like the logs do. Wood is just incredible as it starts to rot. It has the ability to retain water like a sponge but it also has the ability to displace water when So it's just ideal to put underneath our soil. I think it's a lot better than something like gravel in my opinion because yes gravel will help with drainage but it does not help with water retention. Woodchips will help with both. For woodchips I fill them up to about 18 inches from the top of my bed. Then I add a few inches of a buffer layer of soil so if my roots do stretch below 12 inches they have a bit of soil to tap into and not just woodchips. For this I use old soil from potted plants or you can use some old compost you have laying around. At this point our beds are mostly filled for free plus we're getting a bunch of benefits from when we added at the bottom. Now we only have about 12 or so inches left to fill. If you have a shorter raised bed like this one it's about 17 inches you can put a few inches of woodchips at the bottom or even compost. Just make sure you leave at least 12 inches for quality soil. If you do put woodchips at the bottom of your bed though make sure that you layer them. You don't want to mix them into the soil. If you do that it will cause a soil stomach ache and the woodchips will rob nitrogen from your soil. If your raised bed is only about 10 to 12 inches tall I suggest adding some cardboard at the bottom before you start filling it with soil. This will help prevent any old weeds from poking up through and wreaking havoc in your bed. Next we need to fill our beds with soil and there are a number of different options. A super cheap one would be to find a place that can deliver compost to you locally. Preferably a cow manure compost that's fully aged. It's not something that I would put in my beds and plant directly into but some people do and they say they have success with it. You could also buy bag soil like this, a raised bed soil mix, but it's pretty expensive and in my opinion the soil really isn't that great. The structure is something that's lacking and it just seems like it's a lot of sticks. What I suggest you do if possible is make your own soil. That's what I do and the results are unbelievable. We're talking perfect healthy productive plants. You can make a fantastic soil mix with only three ingredients. You can use coco coir or peat moss for the base. Either one will work but I prefer to use coco coir. Then we'll need some compost. You can use a mushroom compost or a cow manure compost. Most of the time I'll use a mushroom compost because I can get it locally. And the third ingredient what we want to use is perlite. Perlite will help with drainage and will also help keep our soil nice and light so it's easy for the roots to move through. I have a few videos going into detail on how I make my soil so if you want an in-depth version of that you can check it out. After we choose our soil next we just add it to the top 12 inches or so of our bed then we can go by and level it all out. At this point we would be ready to plant but I suggest you go by and add some all-purpose organic fertilizer to your bed. You will be blown away by how much a difference just a little bit of organic fertilizer will make with the health of your plants and the overall production. If you use an organic fertilizer you really won't have to worry about burning your plants and it will help support and increase the life in the soil. Then if you want you could add some plant-specific fertilizer to help boost growth even more. I like using this blood meal when planting my lettuce and also going by and adding a top dressing of it because it's super high in nitrogen and lettuce we're just growing for the leaves so the nitrogen will really boost the growth. Let me show you what I do. I'll just take some blood meal like this you can see these lettuces looking beautiful right here super healthy. We'll just take some of this blood meal and sprinkle it around the base of the plant just like this not too much then I'll just mix it into the top few inches lightly. After that I'll go by and water it in. We're supposed to get some rain here tonight so I'll just leave it. That will just help again boost the growth of these leaves and it's lettuce so we're just growing it for the leaves. If there's something like tomatoes or something we wouldn't want to use this as a tomato starts to flower because it's too high in nitrogen. For things that are fruiting we want them to focus on the fruit not on the leafy green. So blood meal it's specific don't overuse it but it definitely helps for things like lettuce. When it comes to a garden it's truly all about creating the best potential growth environment for the roots of our plants. Healthy roots means healthy plants that are productive that fight off disease and just ones that never stop producing. So building a base or foundation in our beds to help support soil and improve the soil over time is super beneficial. It will help with retention of water and also the drainage of water and by focusing on the soil and also what goes underneath the soil what we'll do is just ensure ourselves massive productive beds and gardens that just kick out so much food for us. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. It's one of those days where the clouds are like overcast and then the sun comes out for a minute and then it's overcast but that's what happens in the spring. We've got a lot of our plants in. Things like lettuces and spinaches are doing fantastic. It's such an exciting time. The carrots are coming up and the new growth on our brassicas are looking super super healthy like you can see right here looking nice. Overall though it's just great to be out here and I hope that you guys got a lot of value from this video. I wanted to send a thank you to one of our new channel members Linda Bain. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. I also want to encourage you to get out into the garden and get some work done. It seems like this time of the year what happens it's like um maybe like early April we'll get a few really nice days where it's like 70 degrees 80 degrees everyone's so hyped on gardening they get out there and then all of a sudden we get like a couple weeks of cold weather and then everyone kind of just is like man I don't know if I could do it anymore but I'm telling you the nice weather is coming back. May's around the corner and well actually yeah it basically is May at this point. So May's here and the nice weather is going to be here. The flowers are going to be blooming. So get out in your garden so that you can be eating healthy food right out of it. Pick some fresh stuff just on cue. There's some people working outside too. I think people are just getting ready to get outside again and be excited for the season. There's nothing like being out here. I had a blast in this video. If you guys enjoyed it hit the like button hit the subscribe button and don't forget to share this with your friends if you think they will get value out of it also. I just love being out here. The homestead is looking fantastic. I just planted 200 strawberries the other day and I've got the 40 blueberries in. Things are just really heating up over there and I cannot wait to bring you guys for a long with an update. We'll catch you on another one real soon. We out!