Compost & Garden Soil Suppliers Don't Want You To Know About This Cheap Way To Fill Your Raised Beds

you know one of the most cost prohibitive components of beginning a raised bed garden isn't necessarily the construction of the bed but it's filling the bed with compost soil a combination of the two sticker shock is definitely a real emotion felt by many a new gardener when they first began to build out their raised bed garden well i've got some good news for you for over a decade now i've been implementing a technique when filling up my raised beds that has cut back my soil costs by upwards of 75 percent but rather than just tell you how i go about saving so much when filling my raised bed i want to give you a visual today so that you can get a better understanding of all the different ways that you can implement the same technique and save a bunch of dough first off it's important to note that many plants are going to do very well and thrive in as little as six inches of soil some plants prefer 12 but you really don't need to go much deeper than that so if you've got a raised bed that's two three four or more feet tall you really don't need to fill that entire area with high quality composter soil what you do want to fill it with however is compostable organic material that will break down over the years and turn into garden soil so if we're not going to fill the entire bed with compost or garden soil then what type of materials are best to use what we really want to try to use is organic natural materials that over time are going to break down into premium quality garden soil and also facilitate habitat for components of the soil food web whether it be the worms the fungi and even some of the various insects will come in and help to break down those materials they're like little construction workers for you helping to build soil so it's up to you to identify what it is that you have readily available for you and your location what you can get your hands on for free what you have on site and go from there so let's just say this was your raised bed garden that you need to fill what i'm going to share with you now can be applied to any size raised bed garden whether it's 20 feet long five feet deep or four feet long a foot and a half deep you can use this same strategy the same technique here but the first thing i would do would be to fill the bed nearly halfway with materials like wood chips which most folks can find for free they can create them on site but not everybody has access to wood chips so i realize this isn't going to work for everybody but if you recall a previous video that i made where i shared with you how i constructed my original raised bed gardens out of chicken wire and cardboard this is what i did i filled the first half of those beds up with wood chips if i hadn't done that there's no way i could have made that project work it would have cost a fortune to fill the amount of area that i had with soil and compost but wood chips i was able to get for free so the first half of those raised beds were backfilled with just wood chips well that's great and all dan but what about nitrogen tie up aren't those wood chips gonna rob the nitrogen out of the soil stealing away the nutrition from your plants so when using fresh wood chips in the garden because it's fresh wood chips that have the ability to tie up nitrogen what you don't want to do is mix it in with the soil but rather you want to either lay it on top as a mulch or you can go underneath and so that's essentially what we're doing here we're putting wood chips on the bottom the soil will be on top so although the best wood chips to use in your raised beds would be partially composted chips that you've had maybe in a pile for a couple years if you do it this way even fresh chips aren't going to rob the nitrogen out of your soil another wonderful abundant material you can often find free to add into the first half of your raised beds are large branches logs stumps and they occupy a lot of space and once again just as with the wood chips although it is preferable to use older wood that was cut two or more years ago you can still use fresh wood for this process it's just going to take longer for it to get to a stage where it becomes more sponge-like and porous absorbing in the winter rains allowing it to absorb in moisture throughout the winter months all that rain that comes down any watering that you might do and then it will release that back into the bed throughout the summer months helping to reduce your water costs and eventually due to all the moisture and soil surrounding the wood in this bed it's going to break down become crumbly and turn in to humus-like soil this wood's not that old and you can already see where we're going with this another wonderful organic material to add into your beds is leaves so here i've got a nice bag of leaves that i bagged up about a month ago and i'm allowing to turn into leaf mold a wonderful addition to any garden but if you want to you can add these leaves at any stage into your raised bed garden and they're going to break down and marry together with the rest of the ingredients that you're putting in there to create an amazing soil in the future now materials like this are going to break down quickly and sink quite a bit so you want to really pack it in here if you've got an abundance of these materials now if you've got access to other plant materials like here i've got this this amazing cardoon plant cousin of the artichoke which is a cut and come again crop i use these leaves as a mulch layer in my garden all the time the stocks are water rich and this is an abundance of organic material that i'm able to harvest always on demand so you may want to consider growing plants like this or the comfrey plant is another one of my favorites as a means of creating more mulch and organic material that you could utilize in many different ways throughout the garden [Music] and i'm sure you could think of other materials that would go great in the bed things like grass clippings for example but again it really boils down to what type of materials you have available in your area get creative with it talk to neighbors see if you can pick anything up for free check on craigslist a lot of times folks may have just chopped down a tree and they've either got mulch or they've got logs what have you that they're trying to get rid of but you can see here now how little space we have to fill with soil so we've cut back our cost tremendously and the beautiful thing about this is if you do have plants that have more aggressive root systems that go deep you could always pull back material in that area and put a little extra soil right there creating almost a natural pot in here to backfill and as that plant grows out and those roots begin to dive deep they're going to still wind their way through some of these other organic materials and find their way to nutrients and water and continue to do okay straw is another great material bulky low cost sometimes free that you can apply into your raised beds but i wish i could have shown you back then when i deconstructed my beds how many worms were in that decomposing matter it was amazing almost all the wood chips had completely disintegrated into soil there was worms crawling all throughout that material and i was able to release it all into the native soil into my garden it was amazing so at this stage now if you need to add in some bagged soil you really don't need all that much to get growing and remember what we did right over here i created a little void in that organic material so if i want to plant something more vigorous right in this spot there's more soil for it to go down deep into but for most crops anywhere in here is going to work just fine now the larger the area you need to cover the more soil or compost you're going to need for that top layer and for that reason i would encourage folks to compare prices you know bagged soils and compost aren't always going to be your best option that's better for smaller gardens it should work but you're paying a premium but if you need a total of 10 20 30 40 yards or more you're probably going to want to get that ordered in by the truckload a lot of folks will come drop it off right at your driveway you can bring it back one wheelbarrow at a time you can employ a couple friends to come over join you have a barbecue later make a day out of it just another idea and a way to save on the total cost of the project this raised bed over here made out of retaining wall blocks we've actually got two that are identical was set up in this exact manner we added in a bunch of sticks logs leaves and other organic materials to the first half of the bed and topped it with soil and they have both performed wonderfully we've grown an abundance of eggplants cucumbers squash greens potatoes and about two years ago because the bed had begun to sink down which happens with raised beds as those materials break down the soil will sink down a bit so you need to top it off but what i did is i dug two foot deep holes and then i dropped in some logs from a tree that we fell in the yard to occupy that space so i was able to excavate some of that soil and put it towards the top and then again fill that void with logs and that was fresh cut wood and the bed has continually performed beautifully after that we actually had the most abundant cucumber harvest we've ever had on this raised bed over here last year so this technique that i'm sharing with you today really does work so with that my friends i hope you found this video helpful or entertaining in some way if so be sure to smash the like button for us and if you haven't already consider subscribing to the channel new uploads every week sometimes every day and we're always giving you updates on all the different things growing on around here so with that have yourself a good one until next time this is dan from plantabundance.com take care i'll be talking again soon [Music] you

Channel: Plant Abundance

Views: 1,895,036

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Id: Jeb2P1h9VnA

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 15 2022