Raised 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. I've gone a little raised bed crazy, but there are some
mistakes that you can make, especially in your first couple of years
of growing that can really hamper your success, which is why we're talking
about exactly how to avoid them, in today's video. Kevin Espiritu 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, I kind of grew up just like a SoCal skate
rat kid and only came into gardening later in my life twenties,
my early twenties, is that I've made just about all of
the mistakes I'm going to show you. And so I know the pain of them and that
gives me that experience to say really avoid them. I wish I listened to the people who
told me what to do early on because in gardening your mistakes
aren't just like, "Oh, I messed something up and I can
go fix it tomorrow." It's like, "Oh my season's over. I
ruined a season." Right? If you make a mistake on
a tomato, a corn plant, the orientation of your garden
as we're going to get into, so we have some tips for you. I'm going to explain what the problem
is and then a better solution for it. So cultivate that like button for
1,000,001 raised bed gardening harvests in your future. And let's get into the video. So I'm going to try to do these
tips in order of their severity, in 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 annual and perennial
vegetables that we grow prefer full sun, which means at least six to
eight hours of sun direct sun a day. And so as you can see, that's west. The sun is setting in the west
right now in this beautiful, beautiful summery day here in San Diego. And I'm getting exposure throughout
the whole day. So just like this, and it's a perfect, perfect
amount. Now, if you mess this up, if you build your garden
in the wrong place, let's say on the north side
of your house, on a tall wall, then you've just basically created
a shade garden and you have to plant accordingly. Now I have a video on how
to plant a shade garden successfully, but you might not want to do that. You might want some epic
tomatoes and peppers, all those classic things
that want that sun. So what I would say is before you place
your garden for the year or for the rest of your life, honestly, go and monitor
your space. Come out and say, okay, how's the sun falling? Is
there a tree blocking me? What's getting in the way of my
garden and if so plan for that. 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. It's a very helpful tool, so really do not make this mistake
because it is the principal 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 cause it's a little bit extra. It's a little intense, but you need to plan for how you're going
to irrigate and if your plan is just saying, "Hey, I'm going to come out,
enjoy the garden in the mornings, have 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
because I'll tell you one thing, I've had to retrofit this entire garden
with drip irrigation twice and it was not a fun chore. So with just a little
forethought and a little planning. It would have gone a long
way. 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 three and a half cubic feet, cubic yards, excuse me, cubic yards,
which is a driveway full of soil. I ordered it, it was complete garbage. It really was trash and it was supposed
to be a high quality raised bed mix and it was not. It was basically full heavy clay topsoil
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. 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 gonna 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 high quality raised, bed or a nice trellis or whatever, and then try to grow plants in
that system with crappy soil. It doesn't make any sense at all. So if
we don't want to invest in crappy soil, then how do we actually create good soil? I talked recently in a video about how
to fill a tall raised bed with soil in a cheap manner and you can use a
lot of the tips in that video, so I recommend looking that up. There's a couple of classic soil mixes
that I'll leave in the video description, but suffice to say you want to
create something with good drainage, good nutrition, and good water
retention, so compost, compost, compost, blended sources of compost should
make up roughly one third of your mix. Some kind of aeration component
can make up one third of your mix. That might be perlite,
that might be pumice, some sort of water retentive material
like peat moss or coconut coir. For those of you who are trying to use
less peat moss can be the other third. That's a very good all around recipe. 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. Mistake number five. Pretty common one. Honestly, it's
not mulching. 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 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 rays. 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 the top of your garden soil. It'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, 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 like teleport the
smell into the camera for you guys, but what I'll do is I'll fill the 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 dig it up so I've got to fill it up a little bit more,
but I still have 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
uncommon posted 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 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 about two feet. So this is about one foot right there and
you would leave roughly two so you can actually walk in and work in this bed. So I kind of have to kitty corner in
and make my little ninja moves to do it. But I'm okay with that personally.
And I knew that going in. But I know a lot of people who've set
gardens up and they just didn't think about the fact that they would have to
kind of come through and work in these gardens and then they get really annoyed
and eventually that means that they don't actually work in
it. So as a rule of thumb, I would say 24 inches or two feet
between each bed is a good rule of thumb. 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've 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
I've 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 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 garden. Mistake number eight is bed
preparation throughout the seasons. And so as you move into your
winter, your fall and 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 gonna necessarily fail, but it's just going to be less successful. So with our raised beds and
really any garden in general, 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. A couple of 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 Dowding 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 crops, exactly what it 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 will sort of make its way down. There are a lot of
different things to do, but the thing you don't want to do is
just let it be bare and as you move into the spring again, what you can then do is perhaps amend
a little bit more before you plant in. You just want to make sure that you're
preparing and caring for your bed over time. Instead of just like ripping
some stuff out and just saying, okay, well I'm not going to grow in that for
a couple months. I'll just let it be. The sun's just going to beat down on it. The soil is going to become dry and
sort of crusty and just not a breeding ground for really healthy plants.
The next time you plant in the bed. Tip number nine I believe is not labeling
or tracking what you're putting in your raised bed garden. Now, unless you're Russell Crowe and you have
a beautiful mind or an eidetic memory of some kind, you have to label
and track. You know 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 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'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 tip. These are just some of the many mistakes
you can make in raised bed gardens. And really if you think
about gardening in general, so if you have one that
you think I missed, you have one that you think
is very important to share, drop it down in the comments. And if you have experience troubleshooting
one of these or something that really worked for you, also drop
that down in the comments. Cause really the Epic Gardening
community is just that. It's a community. We're trying to help as many people
as we can, grow food at home, reconnect to nature. And so we
can't do that just by ourselves. We need you guys in the comments
to actually help each other out. And I will say this, if you like the
raised beds in my front yard garden, I get a lot of questions about
them. Every video I say it, I still get those questions.
They're called Birdies Garden Beds, and they're available at my store,
which is shop.epicgardening.com so check that out if you're interested. And
guys, thank you so much for watching. I love all you guys. Good luck in
the garden and keep on growing.
