Can This Raised Bed Survive Summer？

Not every garden bed gets the perfect spot. This side yard doesn't get morning sun, the crops grow a little more slowly here, and I've had to deal with roots getting into the beds. But it also gets afternoon shade so I don't have to add shade cloth, and it stays a little warmer in the winter. So today I'm setting up this new raised bed step by step and showing you exactly what I do to help it work in a hot climate. The first thing I think about when I'm putting a bed in place is that I want it to be in the right place because beds are a lot easier to move when they're empty than when they're full. I had raised beds here before so I know approximately where I want this bed to be, but I want to make sure that it's level, that it's the same distance from the wall as this other bed that I put in, and get all of that dialed in before I fill it with soil because it gets a lot harder to move. I'll use this bed as a guide. I want to make sure it is about the same distance. And then because I had beds here I already have these drip lines coming up and make sure I have it in the right location. But I want to make sure I've got it about right. Then I also want to make sure it's level because with something like these watering grids the surface of the bed needs to be level because if there's not enough water pressure it's not going to water evenly. So if you have weeds or something else under your bed you might want to put something like a weed barrier. If you have Bermuda grass that is when I would definitely look into having some kind of a weed cloth. A fabric permeable weed cloth but a nice thick one that can keep the Bermuda grass from coming through because Bermuda even though there's a lot of soil it's going to find a way. Make sure that when you put water on here it has some place to go. I have wood chips here. These are just fine. Bad drainage can kill your plants. So we want to make sure it can drain. This bed is in place. Next thing to do fill it with soil. This is my raised bed mix from Arizona Worm Farm. I love it. It has their compost, worm castings, perlite and coconut corn mixed in. So it is the perfect combination for raised beds. I have my helper coming today, Tyler. So our plan is to try and keep these in place and get the soil into the beds. We'll tip some in then if we can kind of thank you. So we've got some soil in and I want to add in bed vermicomposting bins to these beds. I love them in my garden and the easiest time to do that is before we fill it all the way with soil but it's getting too hot to add worms. So I'm not going to add the worms yet but I'm going to make a place for them before we fill it all the way up. This is a plant protector. It's not made for in bed vermicomposting but I really like it because it's nice and deep and in these deep beds that gives me a wide deep surface that I can make lots of worm castings with. So there are a lot of different ways we can add in bed vermicomposting bins. This is one of my favorite ways and I actually like to put it right on the corner because these are sturdier walls than this. This can get kind of flimsy especially when there's a lot of soil next to it. So I will put that right there. I'm just going to put the soil right around to kind of hold it in place. If you already have soil in your beds what I usually do is dig out this entire area and then put this in. So it's really nice when you're filling a bed it's much easier to put it in. So we'll do our best to not disturb that as we keep filling it up with soil. So these are 17 inch metal beds and I like the ones from Garden in Minutes. A lot of people are worried about using metal beds but I haven't seen a difference between metal and wood in my own garden and they're pretty easy to put together. My other son, so I have four boys, Calvin is my youngest. He and his friend put the beds together for me one afternoon. It didn't take him very long so it was nice to have the help. Just to make sure that there's enough moisture in the soil I'm going to go ahead and spray this down a little bit and make sure we're keeping this soil nice and hydrated. One thing I did in an elevated bed that I just put in was I added a whole bucket of freshly harvested worm castings. So the best worm castings you can get are the ones you make in your own garden. The Arizona Worm Farm soil does have worm castings mixed in but I want to add some more fresh. I'm going to put a little bit here before I put more soil on. I'm still going to add more soil to this bed but I want to get some of these put on, kind of layer them a little bit into the soil. So we're adding really good microbiology to the soil because that is what is going to help your plants get the nutrients that they need. Another thing that I did is adding these wool pellets. So wool pellets are actually a slow release form of nitrogen and they also absorb water really well, kind of like a sponge. The guidelines are about a cup per square foot. Get these watered in. Then we're going to come back in and I want to fill this bed all the way up with soil. I want to take advantage of every inch of soil that I can in these raised beds. So I'm used to my beds being buried a little bit and so this bin, I want it to be at the top of the raised bed. That would be better because otherwise the soil and mulch are just going to fall into it. Okay now I'll bring the soil kind of up next to it here. So let's get the rest of this in. So Tyler is home from college. It's nice to have him. Put him to work. He's used to it though. I have videos of him when he was little cutting up things for the compost and turning the compost. My compost never did so well as when I had a bunch of teenage boys at home that needed Saturday jobs. Okay oh we've got plenty of soil in here. So this is a four foot raised bed, four by four foot raised bed and it's 17 inches deep. All right so we've got the soil. I want to put the rest of those worm castings in here. The garden got watered right before we harvested these. They have not dried out at all. This is as fresh as you can get which I love. Mixing those in. So when we garden in the heat and in the desert we're in a hot dry climate. We have to give our garden every advantage we can. Soil you really got to make sure you have that soil dialed in. Everything you do you know using organic amendments and not using pesticides. All of those are ways that we little things we do every day that can improve our soil because we really want to have nice good soil. I'm going to put a few more pellets on here. Mix all that in. If you're concerned about slow growth in plants you know that first season you might want to add a balanced organic fertilizer to your beds. As you treat your soil well it'll just get better and your need for fertilizers will decrease because as you can see like the vermicomposting bins that will add a lot of fertility to your soil. Mistakes are usually the best teacher and so I'm going to tell you a couple things I learned the hard way in this area of the garden. I have these vines but my neighbor also has a very happy lemon tree and at times I've noticed the crops in the beds in this area haven't done as well and when I get to the root of the issue it's citrus roots. Filling my beds and creating a very happy lemon tree but not happy garden plants. We had to install a new gas line to our hot tub and I took advantage of that pre-dug hole dug by someone else thank you very much to put in some root barrier and so put it all along the entire length of this bed. So this is 18 inches deep hopefully that will help prevent the issues that I've had in this bed with roots actually these beds and now I have more vines here so those vines would do the same thing they are going to go where the nutrients and water are. So if you look right here you can kind of see the top of the root barrier right here where the mulch has gotten a little bit thinner but this is where the root barrier is that runs the entire length of this bed. It's important to figure out how you're going to water your garden. I love using the garden grids from Garden in It's what I use in all of my raised beds. Let me show you how I connect them to my raised beds and if you are going to run it to a hose it has adapters that just connect the grid right to a hose but I have had four raised beds here before and so we have a valve box right here with PVC that runs the length of these beds and then they have a drip line that comes up into each one of these beds with a shut off valve and so all I need to do is to connect this half inch poly tubing to this half inch poly tubing here and then open up this valve and then the water will come into these grids. This valve is connected to my main box sprinkler system and then I run that through my phone so it makes it really easy but you can also have a hose connected to this with a timer with a battery. Right down onto here and push that in so you want to measure really well and make sure you've got the right lengths and the nice thing is with these grids they're also going to water my worm bin so I'll probably start composting in here. I'm going to add food scraps over the summer composting but when temperatures come down in the fall that's when I'm going to add the worms and get the whole vermicomposting thing going on in this bed. So let's test it and see how it works. So I have this connected to my phone through Rachio and this is side garden so I'm going to turn this on and do a quick run zone just to kind of test things see how they're going oh so we heard it come on so we know it's on so now I'm going to open up this valve get the water going even though there's nothing here this oh whoa whoa whoa look at that so we've got lots of water pressure that's good that can be a challenge when you're connecting a lot of different grids and running pvc instead of poly tubing between the beds will really help keep that water pressure up if you run poly tubing that whole length by the time it gets to the end you're not going to have enough pressure for those extra beds but when you run pvc you should have enough pressure for I would say up to maybe six or eight beds easily that looks great what you need to do especially when you're first getting things set up is you have to determine how long you water each individual bed right so you need to determine how long does it take for that moisture to penetrate to a depth of at least 12 inches over time I've figured out that for these beds that's about 12 minutes but you don't want to give it 12 minutes all at once because that moisture a lot of times will just go in really fast and it may start seeping out the bottom of the bed so I do what's called cycle soak on my beds so I will give them a total of 12 minutes but I'm going to break it up into four minute segments with a half an hour in between and a lot of different timers will give you that cycle soak option so if it does take advantage of that that will make sure that your bed's getting completely hydrated and you're not wasting water by having it just run through so we're going to let these water for the first time I may turn this one off over here because it doesn't need extra water that one's already been watered so we don't need to add more water to that but watering can be one of the trickiest parts of your garden so it can take a little bit of time to get comfortable with that and figure out what you're doing once you know how long you're watering your bed what's going to change is the frequency we're going to need to water our gardens more often in the summer when it's hot and dry and a lot less often in the winter when it's cool outside so your frequency is going to change if you don't know how to run your timer you got to figure it out because you need to be able to adjust how long and how often you water so my options are a little more limited as we're going into the hottest months of the year so what I've decided to plant in here is some flowers because still a great time to plant some zinnias we're a little bit past the planting window for peppers which means I might not get a harvest this season but this fall I will so the plants should be fine we've still got several weeks of good weather for these plants to get established but once they get going it might be too hot for those blossoms to develop fruit but I want to get some pepper plants established over here so this side yard doesn't get as much sun as other areas of my garden but I found that it's just the right amount for herbs and peppers so peppers tend to do really well here in the side yard so I added some to that bed and I'm adding some here I'm also adding some gumfrina I think to this bed just because it's beautiful it's a heat tolerant flower and then I'm also going to plant some sweet potatoes so these sweet potatoes depending on what I want to do this fall I may not leave them in long enough to get a harvest but my goal is really to kind of have something growing in the soil something that doesn't mind the heat so these sweet potatoes are going to grow they're going to take off really and it kind of acts as a cover crop right so sweet potatoes are grown from slips so this was sweet potato vine that sprouted out of a sweet potato or if you have sweet potatoes growing in other areas of your garden snip some vine off remove the lower leaves stick it in water it's going to form some roots so and I like to plant one per square foot so I'm going to take a look at these and use the best ones here to plant along the outside of this bed so it's going to grow and just cover the soil and kind of act as a living mulch living cover crop so when I plant sweet potatoes I generally will plant up to that first set of leaves right in the middle of the square and sometimes right after you plant you're going to see the sweet potato die back a little bit even if it's got roots on it sometimes you can plant without the roots and just kind of hope for the best but it'll die back a little bit those top leaves won't look very happy but most of the time you're going to see it just bounce right back and recover and be just fine so we've got these zesty purple zinnias you might stagger these a little bit they can get pretty tall and wide so the middle of this bed's going to have hopefully a lot of pretty flowers in it so this soil is starting to get really saturated so I'm going to go ahead and turn off the watering which makes it pretty easy for my phone I'm just going to hit stop and it should stop okay pretty simple so let's get the rest of these planted and I think these are oh yeah queen lime red zinnias so if you haven't seen the queen lime zinnia series they're so pretty so again staggering these a little bit so if you pull them out and there's a lot of roots on the bottom or they're circling a little bit you might want to break up those roots just to make sure that they do okay these overall look pretty good I was really happy to see these queen lime zinnias in the nursery I didn't have to start them from seed which is nice so another pepper or the other sweet potato sweet potato yeah I think we'll do the gumfrinas they're so fun and pollinators love them and they will bloom right through the fall for sure these plants can get big so I'm going to let I'm going to put this one kind of in the middle so that it can both kind of fill in here so we've got gumfrinas zinnias my peppers and the sweet potatoes around the outside so that's what this bed is looking like you know this fall I'll have big plans for it of course but for right now I just want to get this soil keep it alive add some flowers for pollinators so if you're planting peppers they're going to need some support so I like to put any supports in place when I plant and I like to use these right here the tall garden in minutes cages for peppers and for tomatoes but I'm just going to put the bottom on they don't quite need the top ones yet these supports are nice because they fit right inside the watering grid just go in nice and deep so you can get lots of support from those cages as the plants grow you can add the other one so the other thing I'm noticing is that these plants have some blossoms on them so my goal with these pepper plants is not to have early peppers my goal is to get these plants established and have peppers for two or three years hopefully so I'm going to go ahead and just pick off these early blossoms because right now with blossoms on it its goal is going to be to make fruit from those so I'm just going to pick these off you can also if you want to pinch back your peppers but because we're coming into when it's hot I really don't want to stress out these plants I really just want them to live right and be happy peppers the other thing I like to do after I plant is to feed everything with nutrient plus it's a habit I've gotten into and I've seen a big difference in my transplants when I do it not so much a fertilizer but it just helps the plants get established in your garden you know I've got some beds in the other part of my garden that are the perfect spot they get morning sun afternoon shade anything I put in those beds grows really fast it goes grows really well this area of my yard everything grows a little more slowly but what I've noticed is it does stay warmer between the houses here so if we get a frost event if I have tomatoes or peppers planted over here they're a lot less likely to freeze so that's an advantage and I don't have to put up shade cloth here it has afternoon shade naturally so wherever your garden bed is figure out the benefits of that spot like this also has turned into a really good area for me to grow herbs so I think my next bed will have a lot of herbs in it let's never done until you mulch so let's get this mulched during the winter I usually add a one or two inch layer of mulch to my beds and it might break down before it's time to plant in the fall or in the spring I but in the summer I put a thick layer just like that three to five inches all over my beds and I put it on top of the garden grids so the water doesn't have to go through the mulch and I'm leaving a little room around each plant not putting it right up next to the base of the plant but a nice thick layer all over is going to hold in the moisture just gonna again it all comes back to the soil and mulch is an easy thing to do to help protect your soil you know in the middle of the summer you think about these beds sitting out here all day the mulch is going to dry out it's going to get all bleached out but when you pull back that mulch the soil is going to look great underneath it's going to help regulate the temperature so lots of reasons so it comes down to the four fundamentals every time soil sunlight timing and watering so this bed is full of good soil we've added you know all those worm castings to it sunlight we've talked about this won't get as much sun so things are going to grow more slowly but it gets enough sun you know it still gets enough if you have an area that doesn't get any sun it's going to be really hard to garden in that area timing you want to make sure that you're planting the right crops at the right time if you live in the low desert take a look at my planting guides it will tell you what you can plant every single month and watering so what I'm going to do is I'm going to monitor this soil before I water next time I'm going to pull back the mulch check the soil if my finger comes out with soil on it if it's wet I'm going to wait if it's dry then I'm going to water and I'm going to water deeply each time that I water so that those roots can grow nice and deep so when you first plant a bed these transplants that little root ball on there wasn't very big so I'm going to have to keep a closer eye on these plants than I would on another plant that's been in the bed for a while because that little root ball hasn't had time to develop roots that go out into the bed once I see this gumfrina start to send out new shoots that will tell me that there's roots going out into the soil and that I can back off watering just a little bit and not not be quite so worried that they're going to die but that the right after planting can be kind of tricky because we don't want to let it dry out so this bed looks good it's all planted it's got good soil watering system set up I'm going to keep an eye on these new transplants got supports in place they're going to do great I will keep an eye on it though and I will let you know I'll show you how it does and how things do in this bed as we go into summer and then when it comes time for fall it's going to be so fun to plant this bed out if you live in a hot dry climate and you're wondering what to plant buy my guides because they show you exactly what to plant and when to plant it thank you so much for watching