Every Question You've Asked Me About The Vego and Birdies: The 150 Day Raised Garden Bed Update

hi everyone i'm michelle and welcome back to my meadow today i am answering your questions every question you've asked me about the vigo and birdies raised garden beds and the environment we're growing in here if you have any questions that i don't answer or any suggestions for other videos please put them in the comments below i'm also going to be putting this list of q a on my website at michelleinthemeadow.com so anything you miss in the video you'll be able to find over on the website if you are new to my channel we are growing in northeast florida in zone 9a on a one-quarter acre suburban lot with this great view behind me here and we basically have 300 days between the frost dates but technically with some frost cover i can grow all year long here and if you like this video please stop and give it a thumbs up it helps youtube know that i'm producing content you want it helps me know i'm producing content you want and if you want to see more of my content then consider subscribing and clicking that little bell notification so you can know each time i produce a new video a quick backstory here i was trying to decide which bed would be right for me and i couldn't find any videos anywhere comparing the two so my wife suggested i go ahead and get one of each and make that video that i've been looking for and that's how it came to be a part of this series it's been 150 days since i first planted these beds out and this is my fifth installment of follow-ups showing you what's growing on with the beds now you might think i don't have my camera set up correctly but in fact i'm on a gimbal so my camera is level there is just that much slope in my yard and if you stay tuned to the end of the video i'm going to share with you some of the mistakes i made and some of the things i wish i'd done differently what garden beds do you have i have a birdies which is on the left here next to the avocado tree and it is the 8-1 garden bed and on the right i have the vigo extra tall nine-in-one garden bed and folks want to know why did i want to get such a tall garden bed it was going to be very expensive to fill i'll tell you how i did that but the reason that i wanted a tall garden bed is because of comfort because of my growing conditions and back in that dark spot in the woods is a creek and it has been known to flow all the way up past where this log is you see here i wanted to make sure that no matter the conditions my garden would be up above any rising water situation and then finally simply the height i'm a woman in my mid 50s and i think these are going to last for 10 or 20 years and so i wanted to have a comfortable way to garden waist high for years to come and it seemed like a great investment some folks wanted to know why i specifically wanted a metal raised garden bed let's go take a look in another part of the garden i'll show you why here i have a 3x8 cedar and metal garden bed that i had built locally for our garden this bed when i bought it cost about 210 dollars which was two years ago and now if i had to order the same bed again would be 350 or more and after just two years in the garden because i didn't put any treatment on it the wood is definitely faded it's not cracking or anything but it's just not as pretty as it was when i first brought it in and the cedar was lovely so we wanted something that would continue to look good as well as work well in the garden and this seemed like the right choice especially after watching market self-sufficient me with a decade of experience with these corrugated metal raised beds one viewer wrote in and said i don't know why you're touting these beds we all know you got them for free no not true at least not for this youtuber i paid for both of those beds because i wanted to know how they were going to perform in my yard and now i'm sharing that with you since that first video though i have received some thank you gifts both from epic gardening and from vigo and whenever i make a video with those or other products that i've received for free i will clearly tell you i will mark the promotion tab in youtube and you will know that i've gotten them for free but it will not affect my honest truthful opinion about the products in fact i've had a couple of people reach out and i let them know if you want me to review your products you have to be open to an honest review and if you're not please don't include me in your program do i have an affiliate code or a coupon code for you yes after reviewing both beds i applied and became an affiliate for both companies because they each have features and functions that i like in these products and other products that they offer and what that means for you is if you click on one of the links that i share i'll receive some compensation for qualified purchase which helps me to make more videos like this for you now as for the coupon code on the epic gardening website you can use the code meadow to receive five percent off any purchase of your birdies beds how much did i pay for these garden beds well i purchased them in december 2021 and each of them was right at 301 dollars delivered to my door with sales tax and the free shipping that they were offering they do go head to head on pricing throughout the year and so if pricing is important to you then do check out both of the websites but remember on epic gardening you can add a five percent coupon with using the code meadow on vigo they offer various coupon codes on their site during different sales cycles how long did it take me to assemble the raised garden beds if i recall each of them was about an hour 45 one of them was just a little shorter but it was because of the experience that i had putting the first bed together now if i had help or i wasn't dealing with a torn rotator cuff it might have gone a little faster how much sun do they get they get about 10 hours or more in the summer and about eight hours in the winter in this orientation and they are in the northeast corner of my yard with this bed the vigo being the east most and the birdies bed being the west most from this angle it's really hard to even tell the beds apart other people asked what kind of metal are these beds made from they are both made from some alusing combination and i will put links on my website so you can read in more detail about it i never really had any doubt that the birdies metal would hold up frankly because it's been tested for decade with other gardeners but time will tell if the vigo holds up to the test because they say they were designed to last for 20 years but they haven't been on the market long enough to be able to substantiate that claim it's all done through laboratory testing now this next question has created some grief for some people so if i misled you i apologize but people wanted to know about the bracing they saw me installing in the original installation video the version of the beds that i purchased included bracing the vigo bed had four braces with it and i used all four the birdie's bed had two braces with it and i used both of those but not every version of the beds needs or includes the braces but on both websites you can purchase those separately i hope that settles that question once and for all i'm sorry if i misled anyone it certainly was not my intention all i knew is the beds i purchased had bracing in them now talking about those bracing let me show you where the bracing is in the bed and why i think vigo has four of those and birdies only has two please remember though i am not an engineer this is a layperson's point of view on this topic i'm sure we'll have some engineers weighing in on this so feel free to add your comments below this is the vigo bed and you can see that there is a column of screws here and a column of screws here but nothing right in the middle so it would not make sense to use only two braces on this bed these panels are narrow and so i have the braces if i recall here and here and here and here and they run through the bed and it helps hold it in since there's not a center point on the bed it wouldn't make sense to put them on just one panel or the other for relatively the same size bed you can see the birdies has two panels on the side instead of the three and so it does have a center point here and so on the birdies beds we have a rod here and here and you may be able to see that those are sticking out a little bit that's another one of the mistakes that i made in putting the bed together i did not make sure when we set it in the ground that the bed was expanded out and pressed out to the end of the bracing but it doesn't seem to be hurting anything everything is going just fine with that another point of contention is how many screws are in here because at some point viggo reduced the number of screws that they're using based on their engineering test birdies uses a screw in every rib which means in this particular installation with all the panels i used i used all 100 screws to put this bed together viggo has designed it so that there are screws in every other rib like so and in this configuration it includes 72 screws to put the entire bed together another question related to the screw placement and the two beds is am i worried about soil leaking out of the bed because there is not a screw in every rib while i do see a little bit of gapage here because i don't have a screw in every rib these panels overlap by about two inches that width combined with the narrow gaps that we're seeing i think it makes it very unlikely that we would see any soil loss through those gaps another question is about the edging if you watch the original video i was leaning towards the vigo edging i thought it looked better and was a little cooler with some of the metal components inside and on the birdies i had some trouble because i didn't let it warm up and stretch out before i cut it and so i ended up cutting it a little short for the garden bed well now my tune has changed a little bit now i've learned a little bit more about the different edging birdies tells us that theirs is a uv stabilized edging that they have been testing for years they used to have the metal pieces and they just didn't hold up as well and what i can tell you and it was a mistake i made when i installed this cattle panel i must have scraped it so now i do have a little bit of rust showing through there now some folks have suggested i put rust-oleum on that but in all fairness to the bed it's under normal conditions and things get scraped so i want to see how long that will hold up with the rust and if it affects the rest of the edging here i really am trying to give this a true test the birdie's edging doesn't have any metal in it but one of the problems that i had is that i did not let it shrink in the sun this shrunk and so when i cut it to the exact fit it then no longer fit and it was kind of loose i have fixed the looseness with a piece of flex tape that i simply wrapped over the top edge of the bed and then pressed the edging back on this will be another one of those mistakes i tell you about at the end of the video but the edging on both beds is holding up just fine except for these two little problems that i have noted now it's only been five months that they've been out here and so maybe in a year or two we'll have a little more information about how this edging really holds up after i showed the rest of my last video another person wanted to know if i could buy replacement edging and unfortunately i didn't see that currently available on either website but maybe that's something they'll be able to do in the future and i will pass that information along to both of the companies someone else wanted to know if you could expand the beds and make them longer in fact you can i liked this style bed because i could configure it for the way i need it in the garden but other people have done some really creative things at flickr hill homestead they have put four of the birdies beds end-to-end and i'll make sure i include a link to their channel and to some of their videos and they repurposed the corners to be tree surrounds in their garden birdies does not currently sell an expansion kit where you can buy only the panels viggo however does sell expansion kits for some of their beds but maybe not for all of them you certainly could click on the link and check that out at their website if you want something longer than this for me personally at least in this configuration i would not want the beds any longer because of the slope that i have going on in my garden all right now let's get down to some physical spec questions which bed is taller the vigo is 32 inches tall the birdies is 30 inches tall with my current configuration the vigo has 22.75 square feet of growing area and the birdies has a 24.78 square feet of growing area which means it has about two more square feet of growing so depending on what kind of plants you're growing if you think about square foot gardening you could put two to eight more plants in the birdies bed in this configuration now let's talk about the overall volume if i only filled it with soil the vigo would take 2.25 cubic yards of soil or if you were buying the soil in one cubic sized bags that's about 61 bags of soil the birdies would take 2.29 cubic yards of soil which is about 62 bags of soil to fill it up so in overall volume the birdies is a wee bit bigger even though it's not quite as tall you also wanted to know which bed had thicker metal in the panels and after they were assembled i brought my calipers out and the vigo was about one percent thicker in measuring in millimeters on the caliper but honestly one 100th millimeter is not a very big difference at all and it could even be an operator error which bed was easier to assemble honestly they were fairly equal birdie simply had a nut and a screw to deal with and i found out after assembling of course that because of the ribbing on the back of the nut i could have hand tightened them all and then come along and only had to press from one side because the ribbing on the back of the nut would have held the nut against the bedding to tighten it up but i keep learning the vigo had a screw a washer and a nut and i found that harder to deal with but in quantity there were 72 sets on the vigo and 100 sets on the birdie so they were kind of neck and neck it took me a little less time to do the birdies but i did it second and learned a lot of stuff in doing the vigo first are these beds bottomless yes they are i have them on what ultimately is a muddy and clay surface so i did not put any kind of hardware cloth or gopher cloth or anything like that underneath them but if you live in an area where you are prone to have things dig up and under your garden you may want to take a look at adding some hardware cloth to the bottom of yours which takes me to the next question how did i fill the beds once i set them down on the cardboard i had a helper and we added old logs other debris mulch and then leaves to fill them in it's about two-thirds of the way filled up like that one big mistake that i made was rushing through the filling i should have been more deliberate in packing the mulching around the logs before adding the next layer and the new beds the soil settled faster than i expected when i first planted this bed it was completely filled to the top with soil and i knew there would be some settling but if i had to estimate it is settled about seven inches now in the five months time that it's been here so the next time i set up a bed like this i will be sure to add the mulch in the gaps before i add more layers of logs to make sure that we are filling it in as fully as possible so i can maximize the benefit of the high quality soil that i paid for in order to fill the top 12 inches of the bed how much did it cost me to fill these beds up initially i added about a yard of soil to each of the beds for this round i had purchased my soil in bulk i usually have it delivered four yards at a time and it's about fifty five dollars a yard when i have it delivered that way that price was from two years ago so i don't know what it might be now but i also had the expense of labor to help me fill the beds and i even hired a tractor to help finish topping off the soil because i just wasn't able to do it with my rotator cuff so those are expenses you wouldn't have but i just want to be transparent with what it actually cost me i planned for a 12 inch soil depth i felt like that would be sufficient for the kinds of things i was planting in the bed you may have to consider what you want to plant to determine what's right for you i did go do a little research online to figure out what it would cost me now to fill these beds up for the kellogg all natural soil that they have available at home depot it would cost about a hundred and ten dollars per bed to fill it up with a high quality soil now that's not all the way full that's topping off that top yard or so with the bag soil and the rest being filled in with logs leaves and yard debris and in the description of the video i'm also going to include a link to ways that you can calculate the kind of soil you need depending on what size bed you have so where did i get all those logs my friends it pays to know the tree people so we had some tree work done here in our yard and then our neighbor had some tree work done and so i was able to save logs from both projects knowing that i was going to have more raised garden beds around here i also am very willing to source from around the neighborhood so if i see someone with leaves in fact a lot of the leaves from this were a neighbor's leaves i drove my truck down there loaded up the back of my truck with the bags of leaves and they actually got a double life in the winter they protected the bananas and then once it was past our normal freeze dates i took the leaves off of the bananas and i used them as fill in these beds so that worked out i know some people don't want to go get things off the curb it doesn't bother me at all now let me share with you some of the things that i thought went right and that i would do differently next time the first thing i'm really excited about was lifting it up off the ground i owe thanks to james priggioni for that suggestion i saw him do it in one of his videos and i thought that's pretty smart and a lot easier than getting up and down off of the ground in order to put the panels together two i used power tools to make it a bit easier three when i put the beds together i only peeled the plastic back far enough to allow me to put the screws in the instructions tell you to fully peel it back but for me because i was working on a concrete surface i didn't want to scratch any of the panels and so i just pulled it back partially and then once the bed was assembled it was really easy for me to peel that film right off of the bed the other thing i'm really happy was my decision on the width of the beds i did a lot of configuration a lot of thinking about that before i put the beds together as to which way i would want to have them and they are perfect the list of what i did right is shorter than the things i would do differently so that's what happens as gardeners we just keep learning number one i would have had help just to flip the beds over so i could easily put screws in the bottom row or the bottom two rows in these tall beds or extra tall beds as they're called i found it difficult even at five seven to reach all the way over and down to the bottom number two i would have leveled the beds better before filling them i'm not sure that i could have leveled them on the slope part but i could have leveled them on the narrow edge a little better than i did number three i would have added the landscape fabric before i filled the beds so i could have easily tucked it underneath the edge i simply wanted to keep weeds from coming up around the edges of the bed so i wouldn't have to get up to it with a whipper snipper or a weed eater and i would have fewer weeds to pull number four i would have been more careful putting in the cattle panel i didn't expect it to scratch the birdies didn't scratch when i did it but the birdies if it did scratch doesn't have metal inside so you know these are things that we keep learning and i'm sharing with you number five i would have left the edging in the sun for a few days maybe even a week or more and i'll do that next time before i put the edging on the bed because i would want it to acclimate to the heat it also would probably make it easier to work with number six and this is also on the edging i stretched my edging around which was probably a mistake instead i should have contracted it as i was putting it on to make sure that i was prepared for it to expand and contract as the temperatures change there is a video from geeky gardens thank you geeky gardens for making that video that he shared and i'll make sure i put a link to that in the description below you should go and check out his channel as well he's doing some fun stuff with possums raccoons turtles and of course a whole bunch of raised garden beds number seven we're back to this edging again i'm sensing a theme is i would not have put the edging on the bed until it was completely filled and so you think the edging really is there for safety the top of these beds aren't sharp and i think if i had waited until the beds were completely filled then i also would have had a better shot at getting proper sizing for the edging now you may wonder why does the edging have to be fit remember these beds are designed to work in different configurations so they send you enough edging to fit no matter what way you decide to set up the bed that's good right number eight now i did my assembly on the patio and even though the weather was cool it was not shady i will probably the next time i do this set up a table set up some saw horses out in the meadow in a shadier area or if i do it on the patio again then i will use some sort of a drop cloth thank you to one of the viewers for making that suggestion because that way i wouldn't have to worry about scratching up any of the panels and then finally number nine the ninth thing i would have done differently is i would have double checked and made sure that the bed panels were pressed out fully to the width of the bracing before i filled the beds and again that was just me having a helper us trying to go fast and get things done but the next time i'll make sure on the beds that have bracing that we expand the sides to reach the sides of the bracing now a few of you have asked other questions that aren't necessarily related to the beds and i wanted to cover them here as well how did i make this trellis this is a 16 foot cattle panel from tractor supply and we had it curved around the bananas as fencing once we no longer needed it there i dragged it across the yard and i pinched the bottoms together and i actually used a rope to hold them in until i had the arch shape that you see here once i had the arch shape i dragged it to the edge of the bed and honestly i just tilted it up and i showed this in the other videos but in doing so they're just connected and leaning against the bed and i can see that it is putting some pressure on the metal of the beds on both sides i can see some more rust there i didn't notice that before so that's definitely then from me scratching this against there because it's right next to that so next time if i did something like this again i would probably put in one t-post in the middle just to keep the pressure off of the beds but that's how i made it i just bent it over and tilted it up and i'm not using any screws or anything to connect it it is all gravity and friction in other videos i had some hoops and nettings these are the hoops still here that i put on for a different reason and people wanted to know where i got those those came from amazon but i will tell you that even though the hoops themselves have done well and many of these have been out in the yard for almost a year i was very disappointed that i lost a few critters and almost lost some other critters in the netting because of the size of the netting and so next time i am looking for something different and what i discovered is that vigo actually offers a trellis netting and frost kit and birdies has a trellis kit where you add your own piping and so i think next season i'll be giving those a test i'm sure you guys would like me to make a video let me know in the comments if you'd like me to make a video about that and so and i talked about it already but people want to know what this landscape fabric is i also purchased this from amazon i buy it by the bulk on a roll and i have been using this brand for several years and i haven't had any yet that i have had to throw away because it was failing i have had to replace some because of the way i cut some things and i needed longer pieces but i'll put a link in the description some folks wanted to know what amendments i used in this bed the first time i used some mycorrhizal amendments but nothing else and i didn't add any fertilization for more than a month after the plants were planted but i am working on creating my own amendments creating my own fertilizer here on the property through compost through comfrey through weed tea through worm castings i want to make all of that my own so i'm not relying on outside inputs to make things better but when i choose a fertilizer i am currently using the espoma organic series of fertilizer and i use that whenever it's possible as opposed to a non-organic solution what is this mulch and is it affecting plant growth well this is a pine and aspen blend but i am now going to just a pine blend because of the pricing i originally bought eight cubic feet on amazon four of aspen and four of the pine and those eight cubic feet together cost me 53 bucks and now would be 73 bucks but thanks to someone who watches the channel thank you very much they said if i'm gonna get pine why not just use the pine from tractor supply boy howdy tractor supply eight cubic feet of the pine litter and i buy the flakes the bigger pieces eight bucks now over time is it possible that this pine could break down and make the soil more more acidic it's possible and i'll keep track of that and see if my plants are affected but as of right now the plants are just really happy having a thick mulch and the reason that i picked that over straw is while i was dealing with my shoulder surgery and being in a sling i just could not drag around big bales of straw and honestly the last time i got straw it was terribly seedy leaving my garden very weedy sorry i just couldn't help myself now this next bit of information i think is important for you to know so you can make the decision that is right for you the birdies bed is made in australia and i purchased it through their u.s distributor epic gardening which is a u.s company the vigo bed is made in china and i purchased it through the vigo website which shows their address as houston texas so where i bought it is based in the usa i don't share this to be political or controversy or anything i just think people want to know where their goods are made and you make those choices for yourself which bed do i like better personally dollar for dollar i'm going to have more growing room in the birdies in this configuration so for another bed like this i'd probably go with the birdies that said vigo has some cool styles and options that birdies just doesn't offer including a rolling dragon fruit planter that i've kind of got my eye on so it really is going to come down to the use that i have for it the placement i want and the budget i've prepared and so for me they are still neck and neck as often as i can i do buy american i am working on retooling my toolbox with american tools when possible i outfit my garden supplies with american made tools and just as soon as i can i'll have some american-made garden beds here too maybe one day someone will make a bed that looks like these in america as well until next time my friends remember to wear a high quality sunscreen and drink plenty of water thanks for watching and have a fantastic day [Music] you

Channel: Michelle in the Meadow

Views: 29,128

Keywords: raised garden beds, raised bed gardening, raised beds, raised bed garden, vego, birdies, raised garden bed, unboxing, vego garden, review, epic gardening, Raised bed, Metal garden bed, Vegaga, olle, vego raised bed, birdies Raised bed, deep garden beds, did garden beds, Garden review, Garden vlog, zone 9a florida, Northeast Florida, Michelle in the Meadow, vego garden vs birdies, raised garden bed kit, modular garden bed, vego garden beds, vego raised beds

Id: YKgq96SjXII

Length: 34min 31sec (2071 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022