Raised beds are great for gardening! Watch me – a beginner gardener – react to some raised bed mistakes that are completely avoidable thanks to Epic Gardening.
#gardening #beginner #react #gardens #vegetables #fruit #plants #farm #raisedbeds #produce #spring #soil #shade #mistakes #tips #novice #organic #heirloom #seeds
Check out Epic Gardening’s Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCM0Tvp6Dko
Hey guys so I am a beginner Gardener I’ve been gardening for about a year now I did I did do some gardening as a kid um but I am still very much a beginner so I thought it would be fun uh while I’m on this gardening journey and trying
To learn new things and how to not kill plants um if I started a series where I reacted to some of the best Garden videos on YouTube so today I’m going to be watching a video by epic gardening and it is titled nine beginner raised bed garden mistakes to avoid rais beds
Are one of the most popular ways to Garden especially in urban spaces like my Urban front yard here where I have 15 raised beds that does look like an impressive amount of raised beds just in that small area since I can see cars in the back background and everything so
It’s a good use of space much better than grass I’ve gone a little raised bed crazy but there’s some mistakes that you can make especially in your first couple years growing that can really hamper your success which is why we’re talking about exactly how to avoid them in today’s Video that lettuce looks very Tasty I wonder what type of sunflowers are back there Kevin spe2 here from epic gardening where it’s my goal to help you grow a Greener thumb and you know one of the benefits almost a blessing of not growing up as a gardener kind of grow up
As just like a SoCal skate rat kid is that I’ve made just about all the mistakes I’m going to show you and so I know the pain of them so I’m going to try to do these tips in order of their severity and their permanence of the
Mistake and so the first one is orienting your garden in the wrong way so here we are we’re in my front yard Urban Garden which is where most of my growing gets done and the direction that my hand is going right now that’s South if you’re in the northern hemisphere
South is going to be the direction you want to expose your garden to because most of our annuals and perennial vegetables that we grow prefer full sun there’s a really helpful website called suncalc.net I believe where you can actually scroll around and on your exact GPS located property you can see how the
Sun falls throughout the whole course of the Year huh Sun Kel I’ve never heard of that before it’s a very helpful tool so really do not make this mistake because it is the principle mistake every other mistake is less severe than this another mistake that is very often made is not
Planning for irrigation now there’s many different ways to irrigate a garden and we can go into that in a future video as you can see I’ve done drip irrigation on mine I have a whole video on how I set mine up cuz it’s a little bit extra it’s
A little intense but you need to plan for how your you’re going to irrigate I do not have any sort of fancy irrigation set up for my garden right now it’s just uh either a hose or uh just me pouring jugs full of rainwater on my plants so during a dry
Spell it is quite a bit of work watering I know this YouTubers in San Diego so I I feel like if I lived in a more desert climate like that I would definitely consider um a more efficient way of watering especially when you cannot just
Rely on rain most of the time and if your plan is just saying hey I’m going to come out enjoy the garden in the mornings with my cup of coffee do a little bit of hand watering there is absolutely nothing wrong with that so long as you know that’s your
Plan there is something relaxing about just checking on your plans giving them a little bit of water um makes you uh pay more attention I guess uh than if you have everything set up where you can just ignore them mistake number four I almost do not want to confess to you
Guys but I’m still going to do it because I’m an honest upstanding Gardener and I’m willing to admit my mistakes so when I first started the Epic Garden I ordered 3 and 1/2 cubic feet cubic yards excuse me cubic yards which is a driveway full of soil I
Ordered it and it was complete garbage it really was trash and it was supposed to be a highquality raised bed and it was not it was basically full heavy clay top soil with like a smattering of compost in it and I was stuck with it
And I didn’t know any better at the time and I filled most of the beds that you see here with it I have been aware of that um I have done my research on the different types of gardening soils and I do know that um just getting uh a bunch
Of random junk dirt is not going to do any good for your garden I’m just building up my soil the slow way but uh it is slowly improving so supplementing it with compost is probably a lot better than hauling in just a bunch of jun where I don’t know what’s in
It the property I’m on it’s never been gardened before so the soil is not the greatest and I don’t really want to go out and buy bucket loads of soil now they got a decent season of growing out and then it was just completely compacted The Roots couldn’t go anywhere
There were nitrogen deficiencies all sorts of problems were happening so if you’re going to invest in something you should invest in your soil because we really don’t feed our plants we feed the soil and then the soil and the life within it is what feeds the plants and
So that’s why it’s so important you know you don’t go to a car dealership really honestly who goes to a car dealership these days but I’m going to continue the metaphor you don’t go to a car dealership grab a Maserati and then put a Camry engine in it and say why does it
Drive like a Camry that doesn’t make any sense so you don’t go buy like a nice highquality raised bed or a nice trellis or whatever I actually did go to a car dealership buying my last vehicle I I like to see it suffice to say you want to create something with good
Drainage good nutrition and good water retention on a side note most my garden right now is not in a raised bed it’s kind of dispersed uh throughout my yard my yard has a lot of shady areas not that many large pockets of Sunny areas to Garden
Um so I have kind of one larger area um where I plant things that need the most on and then I have small pockets of kind of more shade loving plants dispersed around the outside of the house and whatnot I did recently um build uh I did
Recently build quite a large race bed out of some recycled wood that was previously used for somebody else’s garden bed um because I plan on planting sweet potatoes this year and there’s no place in my yard um and there’s no place in my yard where I really want to dig up
That much ground while harvesting them because there’s a a lot of erosion problems in the yard and that’s a whole other issue but anyway if you want to use a lot of your native soil you may fill around half of a raised bed with Native top soil and then mix in about
25% compost 25% grass clippings unfinished compost you know that sort of thing to round it out that’s what I plan to do with the raised bed I built um I have watched some previous videos of his where he filled the bottom of a raised bed with like a bunch of logs um and
Debris and stuff so I plan on putting that at the bottom of the rais bed and kind of a mixture of compost and uh maybe some leaves and uh soil that too mistake number five pretty common one honestly it’s not mulching and I don’t know why I think it’s maybe
Because when we as a beginner Gardener we hear the word mulch we just literally do not know what that means at all and it sounds weird I do mulch um but I am all about trying to Garden for free so my mulch is leaf mulch uh I mentioned
There are a lot of trees on my property and so with a lot of trees come a lot of leaves why not make use of Nature’s mulch so that is what I use for mulch um it’s good most the time um with smaller plants if I want um a nice layer of
Mulch around them sometimes I use grass clippings too um but they worked really well for like uh my strawberry bed both as a mulch and as a cover for the winter and the benefit of leaves and well mulch in general um as far as I know is that
Eventually it breaks down and also adds to the soil and so we don’t understand it we don’t know what it does mulch is basically an organic covering for the top of your soil that’s going to protect your soil it’s going to help keep it nice and moist the soil life will be
Nice and protected from the sun’s harmful R yes that for sure mulching reduces watering by so much it keeps the soil underneath so much more mulch so much more moist saving me lots of time it’s going to keep water in the soil and overall it just manages the garden a lot
Better you can almost think of mulch as sort of a buffer layer to that the top of your garden soil that’s going to really help protect and care for the plants within so that’s why when I’m filling a raised bed this is my herb bed and gosh it really smells amazing right
Now I have this African blue basil but also the French or the Spanish lavender that’s just going off right now it smells amazing I wish I could side note um my mom actually gave me two lavender plants last year and I planted them and for some reason whatever animal just
Kept digging them up again and again until they ultimately died but they smelled amazing when I got them like teleport the smell into the camera for you guys but what I’ll do is I’ll fill a raised bed up and I’ll leave a couple inches at the top and that couple inches
Will eventually be dedicated to mulch and so in this bed I’ve had a skunk kind of come through and and dig it up so I got to fill it up a little bit more but I still have maybe it was a skunk to apply maybe about oh I would say another
Inch or so of mulch now what sources can you use for mulch that’s really sort of up to you you can use things like shredded straw that’s a very good good source you can use wood chip style mulch but you just have to be careful because uncomposted unbroken down wood chips can
Actually steal nitrogen from the soil for a little bit until they break down so if you’re going to do that I I have heard that would recommend not doing it in a vegetable bed or an herb bed like this maybe use something like straw or like some sort of more broken down Material Mistake number six is not having a workable spacing between your beds and this is a mistake I’m currently making on purpose and really Follow My Lead if you want to but I don’t recommend it because I’m really trying to cram as much as I can into my garden so I can
Show you guys everything that I possibly can in this space so if you have more space and you don’t want to be cramped I’m a pretty big guy and I’ve cramped myself but usually what you would do is you would leave a about 2T so this is
About 1T right there and you would leave roughly two so you can actually walk in and work in this bed that is totally something I would do uh I’m always trying to squeeze as much stuff in as possible and so I would totally be like if I had the space and
The amount of rais beds he had I’d probably be like yeah it’s fine I can just squeeze through here no no thought of my personal Comfort mistake number seven is when you’re planting in a raised bed not thinking about the eventuality of that plant how that plant’s going to look
Once it’s fully grown so here’s a good example of a way that you can plant a raised bed remember tip number one was placement south facing is this way right here which means that sun exposure is going to be coming throughout the day here which means that if I was to have
Planted my peas and beans up front and these newly transplanted in leafy greens behind I would have completely shaded them out and they really wouldn’t grow that well so what did I do I kind of created a little lift here so I have my low Growers up front AKA on the south
Side and then my beans which are my mid-tier Growers these are bush beans those are sort of in the middle and then on the back you can see I created kind of a U-shaped a little funky trellis for my peas which have been doing really well actually we have all sorts of snap
Peas going on here but I’ve created a bit of a Terrace and so let’s say let’s teleport Into Summer right I’m I’m in summer now maybe I’m doing onions here I’m doing Peppers here and I’m doing Tomatoes here that’s how I would design this bed and so if you don’t think about
That you’re just going to be unnecessarily shading and making poor use of the space in your Gard yeah I’ve made that mistake before and I am sure that if the plants I put in front of them had actually grown to their uh had actually grown to their proposed
Tight instead of barely growing at all they would have bet they would have blocked the sun of the smaller plants mistake number eight is bed preparation throughout the seasons and so as you move into your winter your Fallen winter there’s a couple different ways you can
Approach taking care of your bed and if you don’t do it you’re not going to necessarily fail but it’s just going to be less successful so with our raised beds and really any Garden in general you you want your soil to improve improve improve improve over time and a
Bad way to do that would be as I have in this bed to just let it be bare when I’m not growing I just cleared this out so I’m very quickly going to replant this and amend but let’s say we’re moving from fall into winter couple things you
Can do you can just throw on some mulch a couple inches of mulch and let it be you can do what Charles doubting does and throw a couple inches of compost on and let it be you can take a cover crop spread that over and a cover crop is
Exactly what it sounds sounds like it’s a crop that covers the soil and protects the soil and then just let that die in the winter all of that green material will die on the surface and it will sort of make its way down there a lot of
Different things to do but the thing you don’t want to do is just let it be bare um that’s currently what I’m doing uh if any garden bed is not out of use I’ll just let leaves pile on top of it they they almost naturally do it because the trees
Um but um excess leaves um in other parts of my yard I’ll just pile on top of an unused bed for the for the cold season I have not done any cover crops as of yet tip number nine I believe is not labeling or tracking what you’re
Putting in your raised bed garden now unless you’re Russell Crow and you have a beautiful mind or an identic memory of some kind you have to label in track you know I am terrible at labeling my plant granted I have a pretty good memory but often if I plant more than one variety
Of something like a tomato or a squash um then I have no idea which is which I’ve mixed up brasas before too um my strategy is then just to wait and see what it becomes either way I’ll eat it I yes I know this is African blue
Basil I know what I planted here’s Greek columnar basil right here but some of the stuff you just will forget and you’ll forget the specific variety and you may even forget when you planted it and for a lot of plants when you planted it is much more important than what
Exact cultivar you planted because let’s say for tomatoes or for our peas and beans you want to know when it’s getting ready for that next phase if I have to start pruning it if I have to start pulling it whatever the case may be so I highly recommend labeling I do um I’m
I’m pretty good at tracking when I plant things um I keep a spreadsheet of it so I can sort of keep track of things I’ll sometimes like I do right here with this amazel basil from Proven Winners I will leave these in but a lot
Of the times I just have a little Google sheet on my computer you can draw it out on graph paper it doesn’t matter it’s just the method is I’m agnostic to the method the way you do it is the way you do it as long as you do it and you’re
Going to have much more success you know what we measure we manage that’s just a truth of the universe if you’re tracking it you’re aware of it and if you’re aware of it you actually care about it enough to to manage it you know and sadly one of the things that that kills
A lot of new gardeners is that they just lose track they get overwhelmed they give up and then everything dies and they say I I knew I didn’t have a green thumb and that’s just a very sad truth so that is our final okay okay guys there you have it there was epic
Gardening goodbye