10 Raised Bed Mistakes You Don't Want to Make

hey guys so today's video is on the 10 mistakes you might make in growing in raised beds now i get questions all the time about the raised beds behind me i have five of them and they measure well the three up here measure uh four feet by ten feet and then the ones up here measure three feet by nine feet so while we're talking about dimensions that brings us to our first mistake making your beds too big and when i say too big i really mean too wide four feet is about as wide as you want to make a raised bed because unless you have long arms like i do that's about as far as you can reach into the center so that you don't have to get into the bed so if you do have long arms and you have the room you know five feet might be a possible width that would give you two and a half foot reach from either side but just be aware of that when you're planning your beds as far as length it can really be as long as you want them more about dimensions are the path space between the beds now i have a small space in which i'm growing in and so my paths are about two feet wide you don't want them any narrower than that mainly because if you need to get in there to do some work and you don't want to stand the whole time maybe you're amending the soil planting i like to kneel down and if you have it any smaller than two feet wide you're not going to really be able to do that without a bunch of twisting and getting into all kinds of crazy maneuvers i have long legs so the two feet space is actually a little bit small for me but that's just what worked out in the area here to make them all standard and have the four foot bed width one more thing about dimensions and that would be the height of your bed now it depends on if you're growing over concrete or if you're growing over soil my beds are over concrete and so they really need to be at a minimum 15 inches high that will give you enough soil space to grow just about anything at that depth now most vegetables really only root in the top foot but the deeper the bed the more nutrients the more good bacteria the more moisture that that bed can hold now if you're growing over soil and you're building your beds over soil and the bottom is completely open then 12 inches even 6 inches is a good amount six to twelve perfect now i'm not going to get into how my beds are actually built because i have two videos on that which i will link down in the video description and you'll get all the information you need there but i will say that that does bring us to the material that you make your beds out of now for the most part you're going to be making your beds out of wood and again in those videos i show exactly the wood that i use that you might be tempted to get pressure treated wood from the hardware store because it withstands moisture it lasts a long time however there are sometimes chemicals in those that will leach into the soil and could leach into your produce and so i recommend staying away from those if at all possible if you do use that wood then you might want to protect the soil from the wood and get rid of any leaching possibilities by adding a three mil plastic between the wood and the soil now i've done that in my beds just because uh there's these beds are kind of on the decorative side and if i didn't have something between the wall and the soil the the water would ooze out all over every crack that's in the sides because it's made of several different pieces of wood rather than just one you know like two by six or two by eight or two by twelve and so that's why i have plastic around the sides of all of my beds now you wanna make sure that that plastic is not going to leach as well and so i'll also leave a link down below in the video description to a website that tells what types of plastics you can use and what types um are kind of dangerous and will leech into whatever you have them in so take a look at that link finishing off dimensions uh kind of it's kind of a good transition into soil is you don't want to walk in your raised beds for a few reasons number one the most important reason is you don't want to compact that soil we're growing in raised beds for a reason and that is uh the lightness the airiness of the soil that is not compact because people aren't walking on it it's above the ground there's good drainage and if you walk on it it's going to take that away so it's another reason to have your beds just wide enough where you can reach into the center without having to step into them the next thing i want to touch on is location and not just of one bed but of your entire garden that's important because when you set these beds up most likely they're not going to be real easy to move once you have them there unless you come up with some cool way to put them on wheels which would be awesome but most aren't going to do that so you want to make sure that if you're in the northern hemisphere like i am that your entire garden is facing the south what a south-facing garden because then as the sun goes up and over it's traveling right over your your beds you're not getting any north facing wall shadows onto your beds and when the sun gets further down in the sky in the winter time you're still going to be uh in a good position there for the sun you're not going to have any north facing things shading as that sun moves lower in the sky now if you're in the southern hemisphere exact opposite you want a north facing garden so now about soil you can use any kind of organic planting mix potting mix i use kellogg's raised bed mix it's organic it's at just i think it's at every hardware store you know home depot lowe's in the united states i've heard from several people over the count all over the country that have found it at theirs uh so you could definitely use that now i have heard i've heard from lots of you some of you love it and a couple of you i heard actually found plastic or trash in it so i've gone through countless bags and i've never found anything like that so i guess there is you know an occasional something that might show up somehow i don't know i've always had good luck with it and i mixed that in with my homemade compost not a real good ratio i might put you know two inches of the kellogg's down and maybe an inch of my compost and just kind of mix it together a little bit um just the kellogg's or whatever brand you find as long as it's organic it's going to be great if as you're fertilizing throughout the season and as your plants are you know growing and then passing away and adding the roots to the soil because i don't dig things i don't really pull a whole bunch out i pull the main roots out but all those feeder roots are going to be there to decompose and still feed your soil so as long as it's organic any type of raised bed mix what you don't want to put in is garden soil or top soil that is going to compact very easily and you're going to have a real big mess and you're going to end up having to empty out your raised beds and fill them with the right thing now that is actually the most expensive part of growing in raised beds is actually filling them with soil especially if you're getting up to you know 15 24 or higher inches that's a lot of soil and so what you can do is you can actually fill taller beds with things in the bottom so i showed you in our container video from last year that you can use um like uh soda bottles or water bottles things like that that instead of sending them to the recycle you can recycle them in your own beds you still want to have 12 to 15 inches of soil so we're really talking about beds that are more than 15 inches high you can also use bran tree branches logs again you still want 15 inches of soil above that if you put logs or tree branches things that you know are going to take a long time to break down in a bed that is maybe 12 inches tall it is going to rob the nitrogen from the soil and from your plants so only add those things if it's a must and if the bed is more than 15 inches deep now as the season wears on as the year progresses you're gonna notice that your soil level in your raised beds is getting lower now part of that is due to compaction part of that is due to just weathering you know if it gets dry some might blow away some might wash away your plants are taking nutrients out and breaking down what's in there so every year you're gonna need to top up your raised beds and so i do that actually spring and fall i put a couple of inches of again you know an organic bagged potting soil or mix and homemade compost and i didn't do that this past spring a lot of you know i was going through some medical stuff and wasn't able to do that so my beds are actually about six inches lower than they should be and so actually my crop suffered a little bit this year because of that so this when i get these summer crops out i'm gonna be adding maybe five to six inches of new compost and planting mix now going along those same lines uh just like in the ground you want to mulch your beds and for the same reasons stopping weeds keeping moisture in you know the moisture in your beds actually wicks away faster than in the ground so a lot of people don't think about mulching even containers but raised beds for sure to keep that moisture level in there we've talked about it many times to help prevent pests and disease you don't want the splashback from the the soil to get on your plants because it's going to take the soil pathogens that are bad bouncing up on the leaves and then spread so mulch will protect that so even in raised beds you want to mulch your garden and you can use you know anything you can use newspaper straw i use kind of half done compost and then the worms and things still break it down and pull it down into the soil throughout the growing season the last thing i want to talk about is winter care now i did a video on that last fall where i talked about how to protect your beds from the cold if you have ice and snow that becomes really important you can do that with cover crops go watch that video because i went into all kinds of choices for you to make to see which one you wanted to do now here we don't do that we don't get ice we don't get snow and we just keep on growing in the raised beds i do add cover crops if there's you know a spot that i know is not going to be filled i'll plant some maybe crimson clover or something like that now one thing you want to do and i had people ask last year and i'm not sure if i covered it in that video but if you plant a crop that flowers like crimson clover you want to make sure that you cut that back cut it down and either add it to your compost or work it into the soil before those flowers set seed or that's where weeds become an issue other than that they're a great way to protect your soil and actually add nutrients to your soil throughout the winter so i think throughout this video 10 mistakes actually just became 10 things to watch out for either way i hope they helped i hope maybe they fixed some of your problems or maybe prevented some problems i know we have a lot of new gardeners who started out this year growing in the ground but have mentioned in comments that you really want to start building some raised beds and between this video and a couple that i'm linking down below you should be fully prepared to have a lot of success come spring in your new raised beds i'll see you next time

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 41,457

Keywords: benefits of raised beds, easy raised beds, filling raised beds with soil, filling raised garden beds, gardening for beginners, raised bed, raised bed garden, raised bed garden soil, raised bed gardening, raised bed soil, raised beds, raised garden bed, raised garden bed diy, raised garden bed ideas, raised garden beds, vegetable gardening mistakes, why garden in raised beds, california garden tv, next level gardening, epic gardening, roots and refuge

Id: wEqODPfWIJQ

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020