HOW TO START A GARDEN WITH RAISED BEDS

we will see how to convert something that looks like this to this and if you follow the video instructions correctly I'm sure you'll be able to convert your lawn into a beautiful garden with raised beds so a first step is to carefully look at our area that we are going to be putting our raised beds on and then try to mark out the area to see where your beds are gonna go you can use any kind of marker to mark the area use some Stakes or poles to get an idea of where the beds are gonna go and once you do that you'll have a fairly good idea of the spacing the raised beds that we're going to use come in four feet of increments so you could use like a four feet by four feet or 4 feet by eight feet so depending on the area that you have you can mark your spaces accordingly so the raised beds that we're gonna use is from greens fans it's a company that makes easy-to-assemble raised beds and you can get kits in various sizes so the most common sizes are four by fours and four by eights so it's four feet by four feet or 4 feet by 8 feet and the beds have a height of about 10 and a half inches so let's look at our package it comes neatly packaged with all the parts that are needed to assemble the bird and there are many options available for raised beds you can get very expensive raised beds and very cheap raised beds as well but the kind of raised beds that I wanted was that it should be easy to assemble and it should be made of a material that resists moisture and other elements so the one that we have from greens fans is made from cedar and the assembly takes just minutes as you'll soon find out so you can see all the parts that are laid out here it also comes with some screws that you can use to fasten the tops to the steaks and it comes with 12 side bars so it comes with the posts that keep the beds together it also comes with some tops and the rest of the pieces that you see actually go on the side of the raised bed so these are the sides of the raised pads each side of the raised bed will have three such pieces so let's take some time to separate out these pieces into the four sides of the bed and now what you do is take the side post and then slide the sides of the bed inside the post it slides it pretty easily you might have to just hammer it a little bit with your hands and it goes right in and you basically do the same thing on all the four sides you so that's how a finished raised bed looks like this is a four feet by four feet raised bed and it's incredibly easy to assemble it just takes a few minutes now there are some tops that you can cover the raised bed sides with and it's totally optional and as you will see later this is actually not needed because of other factors like staking or adding some supports to your raised beds so you need to use the same techniques and assemble the other raised beds this time I took the help of my garden cart which I recently bought and this makes hauling the raised beds much much easier so once you have planned and assembled all your raised beds this is what it should look like so on the far end I have a four by four raised bed two four by four raised beds next to each other and I planned it in such a way that whatever I plant here can grow on the trellis that you just saw and these are two four by fours but they are placed next to each other and remember that these raised beds are expandable so if you order or not another four by four kit you can just keep expanding and add four more feet there are some places which might need leveling I might just throw in some dirt there to make sure it's leveled as you can see the garden cart is easy to navigate within the raised beds and this is why I like a garden cart more than a wheelbarrow because it's narrow profile lets you navigate easily through the raised beds so for this step we will need something called a hardware clot this is a 4 feet by 25 feet 19 gauge half-inch hardware cloth make sure that you get something similar to these specifications because there are a lot of options available you will also need aviation snaps this will be used to cut through the hardware cloth now the reason we do this is so that digging creatures like rats or moles or voles don't dig through the ground and come and eat your vegetables now some of you might ask is it really necessary well I think that this step doesn't take a lot of time it's fairly easy to do once you get the hang of it and once done you'll have the peace of mind that rats or voles won't come and eat your vegetables so yes I think it is an important step and I think you should not skip it but if you're very confident that you're not going to get any digging creatures you can skip it but here's the catch you might not see any digging creatures right now but once you set up your raised beds and start growing some nice root vegetables it might attract a lot of rodents or pests that might just wreak havoc on your garden so I would suggest take out some time you know buy the hardware fabric and take your time and lay down under your raised beds the rules can be pretty heavy so please handle them carefully so what I've done here is I've tried to measure out one four feet area and once you get an approximate length you need to cut through the entire column to get one piece of the hardware cloth for your raised bed now when you are working at the corners you can just cut off a part of the corner so that the hardware cloth slides in easily I have noticed that this speeds up a lot as far as the installation of the hardware cloth goes so that's my approximate measurement so I'm going to cut right here so what you basically do is take your snaps and go right through and cut defense and it might be a little tedious and a little time-consuming but take your time to cut through the entire length and you should have a piece of the hardware cloth ready to go in now to install the hardware cloth just push along the corners and it might try to spring back at you so just be careful of the sharp corners if you want you can wear some heavy-duty gloves and protective Footwear and I just walked on the the hardware cloth after I installed it and I just found it a little easier to do it this way and if you find the corners are not working out well just cut off a little bit at the corners and that should let you slide in the hardware cloth very easily now remember it's a steel cloth so it's tough but it's tough because you don't want the moles or voles to dig through so that's how it looks like after you've installed it pretty much not from all sides and you can also have it pull up a little bit from the sides just to give a little bit of extra protection now what you do is do the same thing on all your other raised beds and that should complete the step of installing the hardware cloth on your raised beds you you so this completes the step of laying the hardware cloth for your raised beds and this should prevent a lot of critters from coming and getting your vegetables you now the next step involves adding some cardboard on top of the hardware cloth that you just installed now the purpose of using cardboard is to prevent any kind of grass or weeds growing from the surface of the soil onto your raised bed you can use a double layered cardboard and that should provide good enough protection to smother out all the grass that's below the idea is to block any can any light that comes onto the grass so it's it will automatically die and the cardboard itself becomes compost after some time it usually takes about two or three months for the cardboard to turn into compost and once that's done your plants on your raised bed can actually send out roots right through the cardboard layer and into the ground below remember that the hardware cloth that we added has holes in it so the plant roots will be easily able to get through to the ground below so size the cardboard according to the length of your raised beds you can even use the packaging that the raised beds came in just make sure you are using enough to block out any light that's available to the grass below and then make sure it fits snug inside the raised bed if you have different pieces of cardboard you can just keep them together and I use some staples to keep these cardboard pieces together you can either do that or just layer it on top of each other and then when you add the dirt just make sure that they remain in place but yes if you have a stapler it's just a lot easier to use it so this is how it looks like without the cardboard and this is with the cardboard make sure you cover all the sides of the raised bed with the cardboard and this is what it should look like when you've done it for all your raised beds this one's yet to be completed I got all the soil for my raised bed from Home Depot a lot of potting mixes luckily from Home Depot in my small car the Nissan Versa which I really liked because this car can haul a lot of dirt this is about twelve bags of three cubic feet of potting mix that I was able to haul in my Nissan Versa good job and using a garden cart makes it easy to haul all that dirt from your car till your raised beds and after doing a lot of research what I concluded was that instead of spending a lot of money on the enormous amount of soil that you need this product from Kellogg called raised bed and potting mix has high-quality ingredients is completely organic and does a great job to form a mix for your raised beds some people recommend adding different substitutes like compost and perlite vermiculite but what I found is if this product can give you most of what you need and has high quality ingredients you can save a lot of money by just buying these in bulk if you try to order online and note that although you can order these online you're gonna pay a lot for shipping so it's best to just check out your local garden store and see if they have a nice raised bed or potting mix so this raised bed mix actually has a collection of very nice ingredients as you can see on the label here it's got a recycled Forest Products coconut coir perlite chicken manure feather meal peat moss kelp meal worm castings bat guano all very high-quality ingredients and that's why I really like this mix so all in all I really like this potting mix and it runs about nine dollars a bag a three cubic foot bag and after doing all the calculations I think that this was a cheapest way to buy some high-quality mix for the raised pad so once you've laid out the dirt you just have to use the rake and make sure it's evenly spread out now some of you might be thinking how much soil do I need for this four by four foot raised bed which is about ten inches height and a half inches high so I had to use four bags of this three cubic feet soil for one 4x4 raised bed which is sixteen square feet so for a 16 square feet raised bed you have to use 12 big feet of soil now I hope that calculation helps and what I also noticed is that as you water your raised pads the level of the soil is going to keep going down so maybe after a year or so you might have to add some more compost or soil to your raised bed I was really impressed with the texture and quality of the soil that was there in this Kellogg potting mix or raised bed mix you after you've added the soil for the raised bed I like to use an all-purpose organic fertilizer this is a four for four organic fertilizer made from high quality ingredients only organic material it's called a Joe bees organics all-purpose fertilizer and organic fertilizers break down after some time so it takes a little bit of time and watering for it to start releasing their nutrients in the soil but it does gradually build up the texture and the quality of the soil so it's better if you add organic fertilizers in the beginning as early as possible and keep watering the soil so that the nutrients start breaking up in the soil once the nutrients start breaking up they are more readily available to the plants and also make sure you mix it thoroughly with the soil so if you've completed three of our raised beds and they said what it looks like there are still some more to go this should give you a little bit of idea about the stages of your raised beds I've already started growing some tomatoes here and what I'm going to do is on this side I'm gonna plant some runner beans that will climb on the trellis this one's yet to be done should be done soon so all our raised beds are now ready and we're going to be watering all our raised beds to make sure that the soil settles down now by watering you'll also notice that after the soil settles down you might need to add a little bit more of the potting mix of the raised bed mix so there we have it our project is completed we have converted a lawn that produced nothing but grass two raised beds which are going to produce the Lord of vegetables in the future I have planted some okra seeds here I will probably have a separate video to show you the progress of how they are doing tomato plants have been planted and they have started growing too I'll be growing some beans which are going to climb on this trellis I do know the problem with the bushes behind the trellis but I think I can live with that and there gonna be some more climbers planted here I planted some blue burgundy bush beans here in the front side and I'm planning to convert these two raised beds to an area to grow goats and you'll see that soon so I hope you enjoyed today's video and I will possibly have a future video on how I set up the drip irrigation for these raised beds and another video showing how I installed a PVC trellis to support all the climbing plants that I planted