Installing The Inexpensive Metal Foyuee Raised Garden Bed

How does this cheap China import from Amazon hold up? Four years in, we bought another one.

This video is NOT sponsored.

Link on Amazon: https://a.co/d/a1LhMrV

[Music] Hey homesteaders, gardeners, and cooks. My name is Jennifer. Welcome to Miles Away Farm or welcome back. Today we are putting in an additional raised bed in my small raised bed garden. These are off of Amazon and I found them at random. No affiliation. I just was looking for a metal garden bed and wanted to spend less than what you would spend for a birdie bed or a VGO bed, which are both lovely, but a little out of my price range considering I needed a bunch of them. I bought six of these in 2022 and then I bought another one at the beginning of this year in January of 2025. I ended up paying more for the ones that I bought in 2022 than I did in the the single one that you’re going to see me install today. And they’ve now gone back up in price. And so now they’re a little bit more than what I paid in 2022. I’m sure that has to do with tariffs. They are coming out of China. Uh it turns out that VGO beds are also coming out of China. Birdie beds are coming out of Australia. So just because you’re buying from a more well-known company does not necessarily mean you’re getting something that’s made in the United States. And I wanted a 4×8 bed. I wanted something that was fairly good size. 4T wide is a nice size because you can easily reach in at 2 feet. Anything wider than that and you’re going to have a hard time getting to the stuff in the middle. So 4T is about as wide as I wanted to go, but I wanted some length. And actually, I don’t think VGO makes a 4x8t bed. Vo and birdies, they’re a little bit deeper. And it’s nice to have a higher bed for sure, especially as I get older. But the trade-off with that is it requires more soil to fill it. And yes, you can put old leaves or branches and things like that into the bottom and make kind of a hugle bed, um, hugle culture bed, but we just burned our big burn pile. And so I didn’t have a lot of stuff laying around. And I like just being able to fill it up and be done and not worry about it kind of sinking slowly over time. Anyway, so we ended up putting this bed in. And this is going to be my tomato bed this year. If you followed me for any length of time, you know I am radically scaling back the size of my production. And this year I’m only putting in eight tomatoes. I typically put in over 30, but I also sell a lot. And so this year I’m scaling back on all of that. So this bed, this bed is called a faux is the company that makes it. Fo yu e. And we really like them. The ones that I put in in 2022 are holding up very well. And so I have great expectations for this one also holding up well. We’ve had zero problems with it. When I originally did raised beds in my garden in Colorado, I built everything out of wood. And the problem with wood is if you’re doing pressuret treated wood in order to keep it from rotting, you’re running the risk of whatever chemicals were used to pressuret treat it getting into your food. And so that’s not great. You can also use things like redwood, but redwood is super expensive. And so you use a rotresistant wood like redwood, but that’s going to cost you a whole lot more money. And if you don’t do any of that, they are just going to rot over time. And so I had a lot of problems with the raised beds that I did in Colorado. They were all from found lumber, so I didn’t spend any money on them, but I constantly had issues with the corners blowing out. I’ve since learned that there are something called construction screws and that if you’re going to build a wood raised bed, using construction screws rather than regular deck screws is going to make a huge difference. Deck screws, when the wood starts to warp from the moisture, will just snap. They twist and snap. Um, a construction screw is more like a nail and it’s meant to be designed so that it doesn’t just snap off. But I didn’t want wood beds because of my experience with those raised beds in Colorado because I constantly had to repair them every year. I did want metal and so I’ve been very pleased with these. I thought I’d show you how we put them in this year and let you know what tomatoes I’m growing this year. Let’s get started. I had to relocate this Luna hibiscus that’s [Applause] perennial. Hey, come on. Come on budget. Big stretch. Hi, [Music] gorgeous. A go say hi to Bodie. Give him a nose nudge. Good job. So, I have no affiliation with this brand. I literally just found it at random on Amazon and read the reviews and seemed like it was a decent bed. This will be the seventh one that I’ve put in. They are 4T by 8 ft. If it weren’t for this gorgeous poppy, I would probably go slightly this way, but I can’t bring myself to kill it. We’ve had the ones that we’ve had in for a long time. They went in in 2022, and so they’ve been in for 4 years. They’ve held up incredibly well. I’ve had zero issues with them. And they’re really simple to put together. So, decently made and strong, stable, pretty easy to put together. I would love to have a VGO bed or a birdie bed, which are popular with online YouTubers that are in the homesteading community, but those are at least double the price. And the VGO beds aren’t this big. I don’t think you can get a 4×8 VGO bed. And the birdie beds, a 4×8 is almost $200. So, almost twice the price. So, I choose these beds because of the price, but also because they seem to be decent in terms of stability and longevity. They’ve held up quite well for us. When putting these together, I like to have the rolled edge on the inside rather than the outside. And then we do all of the screws loose as we’re putting things together. And that way it’s pretty easily adjustable as you need to move things around or wiggle things around. And then the crossarss actually zigzag up the entire center. So it’s not just at the top. And those crossarss keep it from bowing out in the middle. And you can see we’ve got cardboard down here. This area has got some wood chips underneath it, but this area was historically quite weedy before we bought the property 12 years ago. And so I know there’s a seed bankank down in there that I just want to avoid having come up. I also have asparagus beds in the surrounding areas. And so this was the one of the few places that I still had left in this area that did not have asparagus that was going to grow up through the center of this bed. So here I’m just going through and tightening everything up. [Music] This is a try mix from our local nursery supply. It is a third top soil, a third wood fines, which basically means composted wood product, and then a third organic manure. And so we we’ve had really good luck with it before. It’s a nice base. And then we topped everything off with some homemade chicken compost. That’s chicken compost and wood chips. This is pretty woody still because the wood chips were pretty chunky. But there’s enough nutrition in there that I don’t think those wood chips are going to be a problem over time. And then here are the tomatoes that I’m growing this year. I’ve got one anise Noir, also known as pineapple, which is a big beef steak. Two Brandy Wine slicers. One Dr. white cheese, which is also a big beef steak tomato, a principi boraz, a sunold tomato. Those are both cherry style tomatoes, and then one blue beach oxart, and one San Marzano. Uh the San Marzano is from Saved Seed because I can no longer get the variety that I like, which is called Rodorta. And so I only have eight tomatoes this year. It’s going to be strange to scale back at that level, but I’m looking forward to tomato season. Thanks for watching, tribe. If you like this kind of content, give me a thumbs up, subscribe, leave me a comment, and share. I have new content coming out every week. [Music]