Planting My Back Deck Garden Beds + How I Design My Garden & Refresh Container Soil

I’m so excited to finally be planting out my first round of summer annuals I started from seed inside. In my back raised beds I’m sticking to a color scheme of pinks, oranges, and purples. Some of these plants are favorites from last year and some are completely new to me!

Seed schedule doc I also use for planning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OWJMi4lMcQ

Raised beds (I have size extra large): https://thecharmingbenchcompany.com/products/wood-country-rectangular-cedar-planter-tl-006-tl-007-tl-008-tl-009

hey everyone we are in the most exciting and busiest time of the garden season when I start planting everything up so we are I mean I like to say we’re for sure past any chance of frost but you never really know I think I feel safe about like mid July that we’re not going to get any more snow here but seriously May is the busiest in terms of getting everything out and planted and this I think is this the first I think this is the first video of planting out my warm season annual so I’m going to fill these three beds behind me and I’m going to show you first how I kind of refresh the soil I’ve done two of the side beds already I’m going to do this Center one with you talk about some of the things I’m going to do differently from last year and then yeah we’re getting these planted and they’re going to be that way for the rest of the season unless something dies and I need to replace it so let me give you a quick look at these three beds and then I’ll go through everything I’m going to plant these are the three beds we are going to be planting up these are the from Charming bench company they are shorter I think they only come to about 17 in tall and I like to grow flowers at least in the backround that just peek over this wall so that people that live over there are like oh my gosh is there a garden up there so I kind of like it so that people do know there is something growing up here but anyways so I already refreshed the beds on the end and yes I did put in a cosmos there already because they were not happy in their smaller pellets anymore and I didn’t feel like potting them up into a nursery pot for just a couple days so I went ahead and just plopped those into the corners a few days ago I also refresh the soil like I said in those beds so I will do I’ll show you what I do in the center one and then my overall like design plan not that it’s that complicated scooching back without falling over anything is that the beds on the end are going to be planted similarly but like mere image so like I said the cosmos is in that back left corner it’s in this back right corner whatever I plant in the center will be in the center whatever I plant on the inside here will be on the inside here and I’ll just flip-flop so that when you’re looking at it it kind of looks like I don’t know going all the same this way this will be all the same going the same back so like from the center out it’ll be mirr image the bed in the middle is going to have different plants than the ones on the end and it’ll just be a mirr image split down of itself so two of the same back there two the same there two the same in the middle that is my plan now on I love Excel for planning basically anything in life and the garden is no different so I’ve put a few videos together in the past I know showing my seed starting schedule doc I will link that down below and then from that video you can also get your own free link to download a version for yourself but I don’t just use that to figure out when I’m starting my seeds I also use it a lot when I’m planting or planning out my garden so that I can get things in order of color and height those are the two I would say main factors I do look at spacing and then kind of ignore it but I’ll show you on the screen here what I’ve done basically I pulled so I knew for the back beds I wanted to have a color scheme and really for this whole garden of purples pinks and oranges but I’m sure a few other colors are going to sneak the way in here but that is my plan for these three beds so what I did is I basically copied and pasted the information from the main tab of all of my flowers of the ones I knew I wanted back here and I kind of have an idea when I’m starting my seeds what I want where and then I highlighted the name of the plant in the color that it is just so it’s a quick easy visual for me to see okay that’s a pink one that’s an orange one that’s a purple one instead of having to look at a column that says the color I can just visually see the color and then I also sorted descending by height that way I can look at here because you want your tallest plants in the back and then shorter and shorter as you’re going forward now the tallest plants that I’m planting back here which I showed you already in the beds is my Cosmos those get to 50 in then it kind of goes down to the gamr which are the shortest at 28 in so gamr will be towards the front anything else taller will be towards the back and I basically try to like if I have a pink here I try to put an orange next to it I don’t want two of the same color right next to each other even though a lot of these Shades like even two of the pink flowers will be different shades of pink but I do try to get a good layout of my oranges my purples and my pinks so I’ll go through kind of my plan well I’m trying to think if I should lay things out first actually I will go through everything that I’m going to plant in here first I will put images of the plants because right now all I have are these seedlings so you can’t really see what the finished plant looks like but I’ll put those on the screen so you can get an idea so I have my Cosmos which is the cupcake blush Cosmos that I grew last year I have next my king siiz apricot or apricot I say apricot asers I have my Bonita shell pink Aster and I’m also reading this in their order of height descending I have the haaster Hagen light blue Asters Tower shamua Aster lady Coral lavender Aster then I have my status so I go into my qis apricot status Seeker pastel blue status Seeker Rose Shades status then I go into my three gamina gamina lavender lady gamina qis salmon and gamina qis Rose and then what’s not on this list is sosia that I am going to add to the bed and this is from fuet so I was looking for something I wanted something slightly taller than the Asters and this is just a couple inches taller I think this comes in at like 42 maximum they might stay a bit smaller in my containers but I got precious metal zenas that I ordered from florette that I will I’ve started them we will be planting them soon and then someone else that I’m friends with via Instagram they got sosia we swapped some seeds and I’m like 90% sure what she sent me was the sosia rose gold actually do I have see I think I just labeled it sosia cuz I was like well I’m only growing one variety yeah just say sosia write the full name of the plant on the labels but I’m pretty sure it’s rose gold which will fit into my color scheme so with that I will lay everything out in the beds and then walk through it with you and then we’ll get to planting the planting should be fairly quick and easy so when I say I’m refreshing the beds basically what I mean is I’m just adding some more nutrients back into the soil that’s been in here so I originally filled these in the fall of 2022 or at least one of them I did so things were growing in here 2023 I had spring bulbs in here as well this past spring a lot rotted so I’ll probably find some rotted bulbs in here when I dig to put these plants in but there’s been a lot of plants in here that have used up the nutrients now I don’t take all the soil out because I don’t know where it would go that would be pretty much impossible on a rooftop deck and I’ve been doing this same method since 20120 when we moved in and my plants have been happy so far so I’m going to keep doing it until they are no longer happy but essentially I’ll take out some of like the top layer the first few inches I will add in perlite just for drainage because my soil tends to get really Compact and the issue I deal with the most is root rot from too much water not enough oxygen in the soil for the roots so I add perlite for drainage I will say don’t worry about that as much In the Heat of the summer because the water evaporates so quickly but definitely in the spring and fall that’s more of an issue and then I will add in compost as well I not really tied to a certain brand of compost I just get whatever is currently available at a local Garden Center I’ve never come across a compost I didn’t like I have come across some potting soils I didn’t like but never a compost yet that’s really just all going to stay in the first top inches of soil the roots on my annuals don’t really go down that far so like maybe this is where the soil kind of ends and I never have to dig down that far to pull up my plants penals a little bit of a different story but this I’m really just focusing on the top few inches so I will take some sort of large container and I will just scrape the soil into said container then I’m going to add in some peite and this is definitely a do when I say not as I do situation because I should be putting on a mask because the perlite I don’t know if it’s like the powder hey there’s another rotted bulb I don’t know if it’s like the powder in it but there is stuff that kind of flies up and you can inhale it I do have a mask but it’s downstairs and one of the things with gardening on rooftop deck is if something’s on a different floor I usually don’t take the time to go get it so I’m just going to put in a little bit of perlite and when I say a little bit I mean a hefty amount I don’t measure anything I’m not you know baking a cake here I will be careful more careful with measuring for fertilizer than with something like this but I’m just scratching this in and then if I feel like I need more I will add more in my garden again there really isn’t I mean unless I just put only perlite in a raised bed there really isn’t oh hey more bulbs there really isn’t a maximum like to much Perl light that I’ve ever come across it’s always been you know too little not enough drainage so I’m just mixing this in here pulling out the sad reminders of my rotted bulbs and honestly I don’t have to remove the rotted bulbs I’ll just decompose but if I find them I might as well pull them out and I don’t know if you can tell because you are just watching but I can tell by scraping through here that bulb ew that one’s like really slimy good thing I’m wearing gloves but I can tell by scratching through here that as I’m getting more the perlite into the mix that it’s much easier feels much fluffier to move around so I’d say I’m going down here about maybe 5 in deep because again my annual Roots don’t go very far all right I think that’s good there then I’m going to grab compost and put an inch thick layer on top or since this is the end of the last bag of this compost I need to go get more it’ll be however much of L left in here and then this I typically don’t go down quite as deep as I do with the perlite but I just mix it around here into the top few inches all right I think we are looking good to add plants everything is laid out and I did have to make a slight adjustment because I was going to plant two lady Coral lavender asers but only one of the six I started actually germinated that was the issue with all my kind of seconde China Aster seeds first year seeds did great so starting in this bed there’s three rows in the back is three then two in the center then three in the front so back left is the cupcakes blush Cosmos then we have the apricot Aster in the back middle and the Solosis on the far right then I have the haaster Blue Aster in the middle left and then I switched it up to because this is where the lady Coral lavender was going to go the tower shoa Aster then I have gamina rose on the front left apricot status in the center gamina salmon in the front right so then that again is the same as this bed just mere image in the center bed here I did Bonita shell pink Aster back left back right lady Coral Lavender in the center I did two of blue status in the middle then I did on each side of the front row is G FR lavender and then Rose status in the center Front because again this one’s a mirror image just splitting it down the center so that is everything that I have here so now we just go ahead and get these planted I did forget I’m going to add in some slow release plant food as well I have this left over from last year I think all brands I’ve used have worked I will also do a liquid fertilizer throughout the season but this is what I like to start with so I’m just going to sprinkle the slow release around and then as I dig the holes some will fall into the holes and then I’ll just scratch in the rest this is the most exciting part of actually getting things planted let’s make sure I am Center so Center would be right there tuck you in I am leaving on these paper wrappings of the Peete pellets you can take them off I leave them on sometimes they break down completely sometimes they don’t but I’ve never had an issue with them inhibiting the growth of anything that I’ve planted um some of the things I’m doing different this year is I am putting less plants in here I don’t know if it looks like that to you but I am doing fewer plants in general and I’m also not doing I think last year I did patunas over the edge but I realized that I well so I put pots in front of these beds and because of that you don’t actually see what’s hanging over so it was kind of a waste like they just got lost behind the pots and that wait for that noise and that was just more space that was being taken up by a plant you couldn’t even really see so what I’m doing is I’m starting with the center and then just kind of placing them where I want making sure that as far as like left and right they’re kind of spaced out evenly just because for me that’s what I prefer so this one was the middle of the second board middle of the second board but you don’t have I mean not everything has to be even for me I just like having a little bit well I say I like having a little bit of a pattern but then then my front deck is definitely not like that so but this I do like having just a little bit more order in my garden back here let’s see so Center about here between those two and then Center here about here so that is one bed down same thing here starting with the center line of the bed so that is all lined up I find it’s easiest to start with whatever’s in the center and then work to space everything else out around it now I will say some of these plants are new um I’m like interested to see how full I grew status last year I didn’t give it enough space but I’m interested to see how full those get if they don’t kind of look the way I want them to I can always remove them like swap things around I often do that fairly regularly in my container garden especially as things die later in the season just like switching things from one like maybe I have a single pot of something and then that space opens up in my raised bed I’ll just go ahead and plop what was in that single pot and move it into my raised bed Center bed done and this is the last one here again mere image of the one on the other end finding the center of the two beds here planting that and let’s line you up about [Music] here you over here there are a lot of helicopters out today oh I just really didn’t sprinkle the fertilizer in these other two beds I will do that after I get things planted and just scratch it in I swear that granular fertilizer for some reason is always the hardest for me to remember all right all done well not all done sprinkling this in so just around there and then just scratching that into the soil so those are my beds all planted up I’m really excited I can’t believe it’s already here that I’m getting my plants outside for the summer so I’m very excited I would normally water these in but we’re getting rain tomorrow morning it’s the evening right now again I worry about too much water at this time of year and I think we have rain for the next couple days so I’m not going to water these in right now I’m just going to leave them be I will nervously check on them for the first few days but I do find that once I mean some of these are already pretty large maybe larger than I should have let them go inside but I do find that once they get outside they explode and growth now that they have more space I do still have a bunch of extra plants I’ll hang on to them as I start planting everything up see where I have holes to fill and I think that’s it for this video so let me know if you have any questions again I will link the video down to my seed starting dock which I then use to help me plan my actual designs in my garden and I will see you in the next video bye