Welcome to the EXTENDED version of our Avocado Raised Bed Planting, including some Epic Yard Farm Garden Update.
Thinking of growing avocado trees, but stuck with heavy clay soil? In this video, I walk you through how we planted avocado trees in a raised bed planter using a custom soil mix designed specifically to improve drainage and root health in tough soil conditions.
🌿 Our Custom Avocado Soil Mix:
• 65% Native Soil
• 20% Decomposed Granite
• 10% Pumice
• 5% Organic Matter (Peat Moss or Compost)
This raised bed method is a great solution for gardeners in clay-heavy or poorly draining soils who still want to enjoy homegrown avocados! I’ll also show how we prepped the bed, why each ingredient matters, and tips for keeping your avocado trees happy in the low desert climate.
💧 Perfect for:
• Arizona & low desert gardeners
• Heavy clay soil challenges
• Backyard edible gardening
• Avocado lovers! 🥑
👉 Subscribe for more edible gardening inspiration, garden tours, and growing tips from our permaculture-inspired Epic Yard Farm in Arizona.
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Back to the Roots Self-Watering Terracotta Olla Pots
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//// RELATED VIDEO LINKS ////
How to BUILD a HEXAGON Garden Planter 🌿: https://youtu.be/7AlpLgeAo2M
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HARVEST RIGHT FREEZE DRYER
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Good morning everyone. Welcome to Epic Yard Farm. It’s another overcast, beautiful morning in October 2025. This weekend we have a big project that I’m super excited about because I finally have a good microclimate that I feel confident that I can grow and try avocados in our garden. And this is the spot. We have butterfly bush on the left hand side uh here which is the northwest side of this spot. And then this east and southeast side of this spot is where the light will shine in and give the avocado good sunshine for when it’s ready to produce fruit. If we could keep them happy and long enough to produce flowers and fruit. We are going to try to dig out uh two hexagon planters from our uh kind of abandoned jungle area where the mint had overtaken the planters. They were too shady to grow any kind of vegetables and stuff like that and use them as raised bed planters for these avocados. The idea of having race back planter for the avocado is a lot of people find if you have very compacted soil, avocados don’t like that. Their roots really don’t like that. And a lot of people find planting avocados on a mount really helps. But my experience with mounts are there’s a good possibility the mounts the soil gets washed away and then you have to rebuild that and it’s kind of high maintenance in my opinion. So, I like the idea of repurposing our hexagon planter. So, we can build up the soil. They will all stay in the planter and over time the avocado’s root should get established in that without any disturbance. Um, so that is the plan. Here is one of the two hexagon planters that we’re going to repurpose for the avocado planting. Um, it’s hard to see underneath all these apple mint. We let our apple mint sprawl and spread as ground cover, but we also use our mint a lot for different teas and desserts and salads. So, we we have this space. So, we let our mint spread, but we’ll put you on a time lapse so you can watch me dig into this and get the hexagon planter out. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. So today we are going to excavate some soil from where we’re going to be digging our garden pond to help fill this race back planter for our avocado trees. And we’ll be mixing it with some decomposed granite, um, pumis, Pete moss, and some perlite to help with drainage and keeping the soil mixed light so the avocado tree roots could breathe and have a better chance of surviving. So, we position them in here to kind of give us an idea of roughly how much soil we’ll need. Come along as we clean up the garden and set up the equipment for digging some soil. So, here it is. This is the spot where the pond is going to be. You see, it’s completely covered with the trimmings that I’ve been doing over the summer. I’m going to clear this out so we can start the digging process. And some of the soil that we dig out of here will be used for the avocado race bed planter. So, here we go. We’ll get the process started. All right, you can see that we have cleared out most of the branches, actually almost all of it. So, it makes a clear surface for our mini excavator to start digging and drilling and loosening up the soil so I can relocate those soil to the avocado racebat planter for the avocados. Um, you can see Zoe is already starting the process of digging the pond. Um, we’re building a mediumsiz pond, not the big pond that we originally planned just because of the water demand for a larger pond. Um, but we’re going to grow some aquatic edibles and have a beach area for the pups to play in. We’re going to have some uh goldfish or maybe koi, depends on the size we end up with. um to build a nice aquatic ecosystem here in this section of the yard. So, we’ll catch up with you when we start digging with our mini excavator. What is it, Zoe? Hey, Zoe, what you digging for? I think you found an irrigation pipe there. That’s good to know so we don’t dig over there. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Today we’re adding four oyas around the root zones of our newly planted avocado trees. These will help the roots get established and get access to water easily um before everything settles and the roots goes deeper and wider than the original root zone. Um we got this from Amazon. I’ll put a link below if you’re interested. I like the size and shape of these. That way it can fit in the space a little better compared to the big round ones. Um, I may hook these up with a irrigation drip so the drippers can fill this when we run irrigation so I don’t have to come out and fill them up. We’ll see how long these last. I’m not going to bury too deep because I’m going to be filling this up with leaf mole mulching. Um, so I don’t want this to completely be buried underneath that. So this is about where I’m stopping. So the next part of our avocado race bat planter build is to add some decorative element but also protect the edge of the race bed. We have these leftover batten from building our lavender lab woodworking shed. We’re going to line these up along the edge a little higher than the top of the race bat planter. That way it can help hold in any kind of mulch or leaves that I want to pile in here to give the avocado tree some good organic matter to grow their roots in. This planter is about 16 in tall. I’ll probably cut these batten into 17 and 12 or 18 in tall. We’ll be painting these um the same purple color as the lavender woodworking shed. It should be pretty cool. Site One out of six done. We just have to rinse and repeat for five more times and the planter will be complete. We’ve finished decorating the outer edge of our avocado raised bed and we top dressed it with some worm casting compost. So, it’s got plenty of organic matter at the top close to where the feeder roots are going to be. And we also planted some uh pollinator friendly plants that will become the ground cover to shade the root zone but not invade the root zone of the avocados. Um we added the oyas to help with irrigation. By no means this is a exactly how you do it video. This is how we experimenting video that we want to share with you how we decided to do this and how we did it based on hours and hours of research between books, videos by other people in Southern California and Arizona. We will continue to report back how these avocados do. Thank you for watching and we’ll see you in the next video.
1 Comment
looks very nice! I bet you have avocados very soon!