Filling your beds to increase how much soil you have to grow with can be stressful, expensive, difficult, and unnecessary in a lot of ways.
Filling your beds to increase how much soil you have to grow with can be stressful, expensive, difficult, and unnecessary in a lot of ways.
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I mix together: topsoil, aged manure, peat moss, microminerals, and fertilizer.
I thought you weren't supposed to till the soil though because of 'soil structure'? I'm confused.
Love your Videos! So informative!
I need to get one of those garden beds sometime I love the white modern color. Our family bought some seeds before from your site. Love that the seed packs seal back up.
Awwwww… i got tears. Grammy said the same thing about powdery mildew as she taught me to garden. Rip grammie😊
Well most people don’t put soil in their raised beds. They fill them with soilless medium that breaks down and some of it becomes minerals but a lot of it becomes CO2 and floats away
Does this apply to planting in-ground?
I'm much further south. We just spent the past 2 days planting tomatoes & peppers. For the raised beds, we turn because that's where we plant potatoes. We turn again when we harvest. After that, we plant something like bush beans (we have a very long season).. we turn the bean plants into the soil for the winter
And saving money by growing our own food 🙂
I use a digging fork to loosen up my garden bed soil before planting. I don’t turn it over though. Hmmmm.
Amend!
Question, wouldn't soil be turned and aerated better by adding insects and animals like worms and doodle bugs into the soil?
This was an exceptionally valid post for me! I have been gardening for four years now, mostly in raised beds. It has been a near hardship to come up with the money for Compost and soil to top off my beds every year. I am definitely going to take your advice! Thank you!
team chop and drop
I am not saying that I disagree, but my parents tilled every single year for years and still had massive gardens. I get the argument behind no till, but I do think it can be exaggerated.
Like so much sense, I don't have raised beds but all my beds are guarded off with rails and each year I just cut all of my plants at the top and leave their roots. Hoping that it helps my soil. I tried planting straw about 2 ft under and it didn't do well for me. But I'm going to take your advice on this one and fluffing my beds and actually burying some of the things help the soil
I live in Northern Kentucky and we have brownish grey clay 90 percent. I have been using compost, cheap potting mix, manure, dead plants from the previous years, etc. it's wonderful. 😊💚
And yes, I love your videos Luke. Thank you 👍😊❤
And thank you because I look out at my garden and I'm trying to fix my beds and I still have plant standing from last year so now I know what to do with them
I've been hearing a lot about Bio Char. Could you talk about how to use it, how to make it and of course the pros and cons.
So glad you brought up topsoil. Some people claim pure soil-less medium is the best for raised beds. Maybe for containers but I am not sure for raised beds. I added top soil, compost, and well composted steer manure to my mix of coco coir and perlite for my new beds. The topsoil adds a bit of sandy loam for structure. I threw all kind of hunks of log, tree root, and aged woodchips at the bottom. In a couple of years it will be like a mycelium sponge down there.
I go full Sepp Holzer and line the bottoms with logs, branches and twigs.
Luke I never thought of doing this. This is such an awesome idea. Thank you very much for always sharing your good advice.
I love it! How would you recommend that we amend sandy, I mean really sandy soil? I top dressed my beds last year with compost and peat moss, let the leaves sit, used espoma’s biotone for every perennial…. And I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of plants already popping up, here in northern lower Michigan 😊
Here in Germany earthworms mix the soil when I put alfalfa on top We have more than 40 different species