How To Create a Vegetable Garden / Beginner Gardening Tips / DIY Raised Garden Beds

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[Music] this is our first big garden to build in this house and boy did I learn a lot sometimes when you have a vision in your head it seems a lot easier to do than when you’re actually doing it but as a beginner gardener I’m going to share all of the steps I took to build our own vegetable and fruit garden there were a few mistakes we made which I’ll explain in today’s video so that you can avoid them if you are building your own garden and all of the tips I learned along the way i’m so excited for today’s video but let’s start all the way back in February when I first bought the seeds to start a garden with the food prices going up and holistic nutrition being a big part of our lives now what better way to get some plant-based foods directly in your home than to grow it yourself now we have grown some vegetables in the past before by accident and when I mean by accident we would throw compost out into our flower beds and then they would mysteriously start growing stuff and we wouldn’t know what it was growing until um it actually grew for example we um grew pumpkins before lots of tomatoes cucumbers they didn’t taste as good but we were accidentally growing things in our back flower bed and that was as close to a garden as I had gotten about 2 years ago we did do some DIY planter boxes in our old house and if you’ve been following for a while then you know that we moved last summer so we did not get to ever fully utilize them like I wanted we built them a little bit late in the summer kind of past harvest season and then we were prepping to move so I didn’t want to plant a bunch of vegetables and then move out and then last year again we were just busy with the move so I’m so glad that finally this year we get to set this up if you are new here then welcome my name is Michelle i’m a mom of three and my goal is always to inspire you on my channel whether that be through motivation in different aspects of your life or balanced living I would love for you to subscribe and join this community now whenever I bought seeds to start planting I went with a friend who kind of helped guide me to say “Okay these are the types of vegetables you should be seeding right now so that they have the perfect you know spring bloom time.” And those consisted of different types of tomatoes green beans cantaloupe lettuce and cucumbers i did have some broccoli in there i ended up not planting that or not seeding those and then I did seed some carrots now I’m just getting about I’m reading the directions on the back and just getting one to two to three seeds and then placing those about 1 in deep in each of these now the reason why I am seeding these in these little trays is because we do not have our planter boxes built or set up yet my original plan was to go back to Home Depot and build the wood boxes that we did in our old house but Chris my husband was like I really really want the metal boxes i think that they would look nicer so why don’t we do some research and see we do plan on being here for a long time and I do plan to take this up as a hopefully a serious hobby so I agreed and uh did a little bit of research on the different gu uh vegetable garden boxes that I wanted so on the side of the house is where we get the most amount of sun and that’s where we decided to set up this garden so now that we have everything seated then we do have a little bit of time to get everything set up ordered and put together and eat y’all know that I’m going all in on my health which is what inspired my organic garden to begin with but meal planning and grocery shopping is pretty timeconuming and being a busy mom and feeding a family of five I need something that is healthy and simple to make and that’s why I’m using Hungry Root and thanks to Hungry Root for sponsoring today’s video hungry Root is like your personal shopper and nutritionist wrapped up in one when you go on the site you can enter in your nutrient preferences and health goals and they will tailor recipes as well as take care of the weekly meal planning and grocery shopping from there they will ship the foods directly to your door so no need for expensive takeout meals during the week my Box was customized for quick family recipes and kid-friendly snacks by the way all of their meals can be made in just 15 minutes or less with over 15,000 different tasty recipes there’s something for every taste and nutrition preference from anti-inflammatory to gut friendly glutenfree or dairyf free high protein and more so shopping planning and cooking food can really be simple and stressfree the recipes are so easy to follow and tonight I’ll be making the roasted chicken and classic potato salad this was kid and familyfriendly and definitely a hit in our house they have awesome grocery options like smoothies kids snacks ready to eat meals salad kits and even supplements and my favorite part is that there is no high fructose corn syrup artificial sweeteners or preservatives in any of Hungry Roots foods they only source top quality meat and seafood free of hormones and antibiotics this recipe was so simple easy and quick to make especially after sailor softball game where we’re rushing to get home get something to eat and then get to bed and get ready for the next day this meal was amazing so take advantage of this exclusive offer for a limited time get 40% off your first box plus get a free item and every box for life click the link below or go to hungryroot.com and use code omali that’s 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life at hungry.com with code Ali for our planter boxes we decided on the VGO garden or they might be called Ve Garden i’m not sure they were pretty expensive and um you can opt for different sizes though and I really liked the look of it we did get the 32 in one and it is pretty massive and that is my actual inspiration for this garden they do have other um less expensive options so really um I think overall if you’re if you’re considering this brand I I seem to really like it and I think that the quality is good the assembly wasn’t as hard as it looks because Chris can assemble things really well now if you’re like I don’t want to spend that kind of money i don’t want metal boxes this is an old video from our old house and this is a DIY planter um box made of wood and cedar boxes like we literally did not spend that much money we bought these cedar blocks for $3.38 each and then we got the plywood i thought we got cedar i’m not sure but we did get it for about $15.58 i have a whole video on how we built this and I will link it below and then that can give you some alternative options if you do want to build a garden and maybe you just like the wood look better or you are going for like a more budget friendly option and they turned out so amazing this is actually what I wanted to do in this house um I did plant beautiful sunflowers in there but um it was something that was fairly easy to do and looks really good so just throwing out a few options there now these were very tall we didn’t we did do a measurement but I was like Chris you wanted these really tall ones and he said the purpose of it is that you’re not like constantly bending over every time you know you’re doing vegetables planting it watering etc so we got the tall ones and we just didn’t realize like how tall they actually were they are extremely heavy and um this is the space that we are going to put this vision together we have um a lot of plants on the side so Chris if you’re new here Chris is a landscaper so a lot of times whenever he does somebody’s yard he will um if the customer no longer wants those plants and they are still really good plants he will replant them and then this is that’s kind of an inventory pile for his work it’s not um us over hoarding so our plan is to grab all of that stuff and put it on the other side of the house and then make that side of the house my beautiful garden so we have four of these big boxes that we are putting together and that is kind of just step one but this is going to have to be done in phases and this video really is just phase one we still have to build a walkway around it because it holds a lot of water this is just the initial phase of getting the boxes set up and then getting everything planted and then hopefully growing vegetables and fruit so I am still trying to like come up with a vision for what the side of the house is going to look like and I found this random app it’s not random but I just found this app and it was called Deck AI and basically you take a picture of the space and then AI will like come up with a design i took a picture of the side of the house and then I just had to like note that it was a yard and then you kind of find your style i just picked zen and then color palette surprise me and then it will process and then come up with a design or some ideas i like that I could customize it a little bit and then I can put I want to replace that section with some planter boxes and then it will come up with a new design and then you can kind of regenerate and then continue to recustomize i got some good ideas although I don’t know um exactly if I’m going to like create something like that one that initially sparked my inspiration was something like this so for phase two of this project we are going to get stepping stones and then do something around each of the boxes and then also do stepping a stepping stone walkway from the gate and then I might do um some more flower boxes or not boxes but just like flower beds next to the fence so who knows but that is kind of long-term inspiration but we do have all four flower boxes set up we are just going to add the final touches and then our next phase is going to be to fill them up [Music] [Music] oh come on so we had some late nights going on we had some extra dirt on the side of the house we’re going to start filling up the first flower bed chris brought home some um stepping stones to kind of test how we’re going to build out everything so I think what I’m going to do is three stepping stones in between each box we kind of needed to get that idea so that we could space them before like space them accurately before we started filling them because once these guys are full they are not moving now I think when I bought them there was an option to like have a a um a bottom on these maybe so that you don’t have to use as much dirt another option we could have done was filled the bottom with like wood or something um just to kind of save dirt but luckily Chris does get pallets of dirt at aable price through um his landscaping business so we decided that we were just going to fill everything with dirt and I realize I keep saying dirt it’s more like bulk mulch but in over the next couple of days him and his crew were able to get um a trailer bed full and fill up about three and a half of these boxes the the one there at the end is only about halfway full and then they also had to get in and get everything leveled evenly that way you know whenever um you water it it’s not like all going to one side so eventually all of the flower beds around are going to be filled with stone and rock and everything so it will hide all of that but for now we have everything set up to start planting i went to um Whole Foods i ended up getting a pepper tree since it is now a little bit later in the season and it’s kind of a little bit too late to start planting things from like directly into that flower bed um I’m going to start swapping over the plants that we seeded into this flower bed now I will say the very first mistake I made for new garden beds was using the bulk mulch on the top i planted everything nice and neat i tried to get an idea of what plants should be planted together so I have my phone i’m kind of googling where to place everything the spacing between everything and um just trying to get an idea of where it should be planted but after a few weeks uh after planting everything I realized that nothing was really growing i was either getting really impatient or I was like “These were growing great when like when I seated them and now that they’re in these garden boxes they’re not growing and they’re turning yellow.” So I went to our local garden store to get some more uh herbs i was going to do some more herbs and then when I started talking to the guy there he was saying that like especially for the first year if it’s your very first season to plant then you should probably be using some really good potting soil uh not potting soil I’m sorry raised raised bed soil because it really needs those organic nutrients to produce well so a and some other stuff i I don’t recall i just was like “Give me what I need to do.” And he gave me the exact bag that would it would do best in and then he said you know over the years it’ll be you know the soil will be good enough but right now the soil you know our bulk soil is just not it’s mixed with other stuff and it’s it’s not great for like newly new plants maybe I’m saying that wrong but anyway we eventually kind of scrape off the whole top layer of these beds and then resoil it with the um raised raised garden mix so that happens a little bit later in this video but what I’m doing right now is again trying to organize uh which which um vegetables I want planted where so when I was doing a lot of research it was like tomatoes are good with these these these these these and then like these plants are good with tomatoes but they’re not good with these so it’s like trying to mix and match everything i was I was getting confused so if you have some great tips like what three plants do you plant in one of your beds um which plants do you completely avoid leave me all of the tips in comments uh below [Music] don’t look down [Music] [Applause] [Music] i no gravity when you’re with me from home till I found [Music] you in front of me don’t look down [Music] so this is my dedicated herb bed but in the front I was also planting lettuce whenever we were trying to um plant it it kept all of the soil kept falling apart but uh in the back here I did get some cilantro i got some rosemary and then what is there i think that last one is basil i cannot remember off the top of my head that second box over there remember the first box we don’t have enough soil for yet so I didn’t plant anything there um that second box there we did tomatoes and I did that pepper tree or that pepper plant and then um the next one was my herb one and then the last one I am doing cucumbers and carrots and green beans now you can see my little little carrot or are those the tomatoes i think those are the little tomatoes that are sticking up a bit so I have um some stuff planted in there this next box is that is all the lettuce it’s it’s hard to see cuz it’s still very small but um those are my little lettuce ones they kind of fell apart whenever I was planting them and then there in the back are my three herb plants and then I have those little carrots they did really well in the little containers and then I had some cucumbers in the back i got some garden labels i actually won a box of planting gear from one of Sailor’s softball game things so these little labels came in that box and um I’m just going to uh use those to put in the garden [Music] don’t look down [Music] i don’t look down no gravity with me all right so this one is still a work in progress and I ended up buying a lavender plant as well i want to make some either lavender tea or lavender soap or lavender bath wash i don’t know what I’m going to do but I have some ideas to make stuff with lavender or if you have any suggestions I am open for you to leave those in the comments i did seed the kale and it has been a couple of days and I have little little tiny kale leaves sprouting up i don’t even know if I planted these too late but the whole purpose I learned through experience so the whole purpose is to just do it one year and then see what I’m going to change for the next year so a few days later we finally got more of the dirt or mulch and we are going to finish filling up this bed [Music] a new place a new home for a while let me feel nothing to hold me back take my time just enjoy the ride passing by life is good best I’ve ever felt get me up somewhere I can’t find [Music] myself oh I feel I feel I feel I feel so alive as I reach out reach out reach out reach out to the sky i find my way i found my way i was in the dark against it all but made it through the day cuz I found my way i found my way bad times i know I’ll be okay cuz I found my way so I mentioned earlier that a few weeks later after we planted everything I was getting really discouraged like the all of the plants seem to like shoot up at first and then completely stop and after a lot of discussions with my garden person at the local garden store I discovered you know it could be a soil issue so um we ended up getting two bags of this garden mix per box to kind of like scrape the top off and then basically replant all of the plants in this soil as the top layer so the person there told me that if your plants start having like yellow leaves which all of our cucumber plants started turning yellow and then completely stopped growing like I should have seen some growth in 2 to 3 weeks and I didn’t that um that this is could be one of the issues so we’re going to try again and I’m also got some merry golds to pair with all of uh all of the vegetables and fruit so not only do they look prettier in the garden but they do um attract um predatory insects and pollinators like bees and butterflies and they are also what he said like a natural pest control so we are going to add orange and yellow merryolds around all of the raised garden vegetables and then I went there and then I was just like I need some already you know more mature vegetables so I got some different types of tomatoes and like he really helped me out on this i got a lofah you guys i’m going to make my own bath lofah i got some spinach uh those are the ones that I had already grown before uh but I did get some What is that that’s the cantaloupe those are Minnesota midgets so they are supposed to grow smaller and these are the sugar baby like little watermelons these are the strawberries so I’m going to plant four things of strawberries and then I also got um a lot of herbs so the very first box I am going to make that my fruit box it was suggested that I put the cantaloupe and the watermelon close to the edge because it kind of like vines that way it can kind of uh drape down the sides and then produce that way next I have all of the strawberries and in the back I still have the the the ones that I planted and those are I think those are little cantalopes i replanted everything or I re uh replanted everything with the new soil so I’m going to see how they do i don’t expect them to produce but um we will find out the next bed I didn’t show again I did all the merryolds and I only have two different tomato plants i still have some of the tomato plants that I did we’ll see if they they again if they produce and then the back I ended up getting not only the pepper plant I originally had but I got banana peppers and then I got a jalapeno plant and the third planter box it is basically all herbs still have some of the lettuce there we covered up a lot of it it just to be honest I think it it wouldn’t have survived but I do have holy basil I have peppermint I have mjito mojito mint and then I have um just a regular mint and then as well as the herbs that I already had which was the rosemary the cilantro and the basil and then in this last box we are doing the long cucumber the lofah and then the two plants ants I have there in the back those are also cucumbers so you see how some of those leaves are turning um they’re kind of dying off and they’re turning a little bit yellow we are going to try and refl um replant those and see if they do any better we also have some of uh some fertilizer to help them grow supposedly next year the soil will be nice and full of nutrients so I don’t have to worry about them not growing or their leaves turning yellow or dying but if I were to have started over I probably would have just started from this state uh opposed to trying to seed everything but this definitely was a lot more work than I expected but I know that it’s going to pay off in the long run i actually am super excited to come out every day and see the new growth we have a couple of things that were ready and we were able to pick just within a couple of days some of these already came with a little bit of fruit on them but um so we have some stuff we’ve already planted and then this is everything that is newly planted so what we also did in the back and I I didn’t get a video of it but we raised all of the sprinkler heads so whenever we turn the sprinklers on uh this whole area gets uh watered so I don’t have to come out here every day and especially since they are so tall if we kept the sprinklers like in the ground I don’t think it would have hit um these beds as well a couple other things I got I got these blackberries and um I need some good pots to put them in and then we also got blueberries the reason why I didn’t plant them into the garden box is because um he said you know they get pretty tall i don’t I think I might need a a trellis for these but they get pretty tall and since the box is already pretty tall um they might be a little bit hard to reach so because I got a whole bunch of new plants I ordered some more of these copper um name plates from Amazon and I’m going to fill them out and then finish up everything [Music] i pull into your driveway it’s a Saturday night you look like a million bucks wearing that dress I like you’re smiling but there’s something missing in your eyes girl I can tell that you have something on your mind or I will make you forget all your sorrows let go like there’s no tomorrow let’s have a drink just relax all your problems will fade if you’re ready for a good time count on me there’s a party in the backyard dance your problems away i’m all about the good vibes i know you’re all about the good vibes do you know how much I love you want to see you smile where’s that happy girl that I know with a heart on fire i’ll do anything to make it fine but I can tell that you have something on your mind right now but I will make you forget all your sorrows let go like there’s no tomorrow let’s have a drink just relax all your problems will fade if you’re ready for a good time count on me there’s a party in the backyard dance your problems away i’m all about the good vibes i know you’re all about the good vibes we are all about the good the good vibes we are all about the good the good times it seems like my plants are so far thriving i will keep y’all updated as we continue this project and especially continue the stepping stones and area around the beds this was a lot more work than expected but I know over the long run it will be so worth it but thank you guys so much for watching if you did enjoy this video then be sure to subscribe and I will see you all next week