Hey guys, you're watching QDCrafts or in
this video, QDGardens. I've been getting into gardening again
this summer and I wanted to share with you guys how I built my
first raised vegetable garden bed. It's super easy to set up you don't
need any nails or a hammer and I think it's a really great and fast method for beginner gardeners like me and my mom
who will also be helping me with this project. In our backyard, we have this area
of grass that gets a lot of sunlight every day.
So the plan was to build a sideways c-shaped frame with these dimensions.
Each of the dots you see here will be a planter block
that connects together wooden planks. Planter blocks are these conveniently
shaped bricks essentially that are made for building garden beds and
they can fit wood planks as thick as 2 inches I need 16 of these for my layout and just a heads up they are 23 pounds each so they are pretty heavy but they'll be
very sturdy for the bed. The wood I'm using is untreated
cedar planks. These are usually used for deck boarding. They are six inches
wide and two inches thick. I bought four 12 foot long planks. Two of
them I kept as is and the other two I got them cut
in store into three foot planks. Then I also got three 10 foot planks
that were each cut in half to five feet. One of the problems with our lawn
is that it's not completely flat and it slopes downward toward the fence
so we had to fix this by digging up the ground
and trying to level it. This part is unnecessary if your ground is already flat. Just place your bricks down
slide the wood in and you're good to go but our lawn is just too sloped.
We had to fix it. First we traced an outline using some old baby powder so
that we knew where to dig and it would have been a lot easier if
this was done after a rainy day but it was sunny all week. And we were still able to lift the grass up from the higher parts of
the ground and flipped it over to the lower parts to
help the blocks stay leveled. We also added some rocks underneath so that it
won't sink too much once the dirt settles. I decided to add a weed barrier at the bottom of the bed to prevent
the nearby tree roots and grubs from getting into the garden soil,
but I've read that many people choose not to add one and they go with
cardboard and newspapers instead that can decompose.
I don't have enough experience to know if adding a weed barrier will be
beneficial or not to the garden bed. I think my main concern is
if water is able to drain well with a weed barrier underneath. If I do
run into any problems, especially with water drainage, I will just fix it next year. Now it's finally time to position
all of these planter blocks assembling one layer at a time.
What I love about this method is that it's not a permanent fixture.
I don't have to nail anything together or use any tools to build this frame
and the blocks allow for a few inches of error when sliding in the different
lengths of wooden planks. First layer done, now we have to do the
second layer. The frame of the bed is all assembled
now, very straightforward and easy. We just had that extra step of levelling
the ground, but it was all good once the plank slid
in and we checked with a leveller. As an extra precaution to prolong the life of the cedar planks, we thought that
adding some more weed barrier to the sides would help
keep the inner side of the bed from wearing down.
Once all the soil goes in, we temporarily use some tape to hold up the weed barrier
before adding all of the soil. Now here's a real life math problem we
need to solve. With the approximate dimensions of this garden bed shown
below, what volume of soil is needed to fill it up? Give answers in cubic feet for full marks. Unless you want to pause the video
to figure that out, the answer is a lot. Approximately 45
cubic feet of soil is needed for my garden bed, but I won't be filling it all the way to the top. I'll leave around two inches of space. This is just so I can add some new soil
the next year and also to save a little bit of money. I need to look more deeply into the soil science of gardening but I just went with some of these pre-mixed garden soils
that are supposed to be formulated to be good for garden beds
and I also have a three in one garden mix and I will be mixing in some cattle manure. The garden bed is all filled up now with
the soil that we bought. We'll probably get some more bags of
topsoil to top off the remaining weed barrier that's showing, but that is it, that is the garden bed
all filled up and finally our last step is to plant the veggies! We've had this for about a month now and
haven't run into any problems yet I forgot to mention I
added some decorative pink feldspar near the edges so the grass doesn't grow
along the wood. I have a variety of veggies that I'm
really hoping will grow and be harvested, including some carrots. I've never pulled
a carrot out of the ground before and I would really love to check that off of
my bucket list. It's also my first time trying to grow
some beans. I would love to see what a beanstalk
actually looks like. Also got some green onions and tomatoes
which I've planted plenty of before. Lastly, I have some cucumbers and my
favourite spaghetti squash, which I successfully harvested last year,
but I grew them in this styrofoam container that came with a ping pong
robot so if they could grow in those kind of conditions,
they should be able to grow in the new garden bed too. We'll just have to see
how things go for this season. That's how I built my raised
vegetable garden bed. I'm really crossing my fingers that the
vegetables will grow, but we'll just have to see where mother
nature takes us this season and hopefully I can at least
harvest one tomato and pull out one carrot. I'm still a
little bit iffy on whether or not the weed barrier was a good choice.
I will keep monitoring it and eventually update you guys maybe in a few months. If
this video was helpful at all or if it inspired any ideas,
I'd really appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up, subscribe for
more projects that I like to make. If any of you guys are experienced gardeners or
know a lot about raising vegetables in a raised garden bed,
then I would love to hear your experiences and advice
and I will see you guys next time with another QDCraft. Bye!
