HOW TO CREATE AN INSTANT GARDEN - HOMESTEADING FAMILY

hey you guys this is josh with homesteading family and today I'm going to show you how I do an instant garden how to get a small garden going in a relatively small space but without a lot of resources some of the stuff you probably have on hand and you can get some vegetables going really quick if you live in a small space even if you only have say four foot by four foot or three foot by three foot you can actually grow a lot of edges so good amount for that space if you've never gardened before this is a great way to get your hands dirty into the soil and get started if you're looking to just fill in some extra spaces around the garden you already have and grow some extra vegetables this is a great method you can also use this method to prep some ground for future gardens even if you're not going to grow anything right away so let's get into it [Music] okay so the reason we're doing an instant garden right here is because we filled our main crop up and we need another place for some quick picking vegetables mostly our salads and our greens we need a lot of greens one because we like a lot of raw vegetables too they grow fast and three you can actually grow a lot in a very small space so it's a super great way to grow a lot of healthy vegetables in a small space and relatively quickly and if you've been following us at all you know that last year we prepped all this space for Carolyn's cottage kitchen garden and we used a method similar to what I'm going to show you here but this is going to go a little faster this was all sod last year and at this time last year we had just barely transplanted all of these perennials and so they were tiny you can see what the difference a year makes of these almost everything you see here except for a few cabbages and broccolis and peppers that she's got sprinkled in here is coming back on its own yeah and now it's way ahead of our vegetable garden so we love the perennials but we need to get a little bit of fresh veggies a little closer to the kitchen so we're gonna take this little space right here just this side of her garden eventually this is going to be a wood fence and there'll be a gate here and so Carolyn wanted a little space that she could come out and just have some solid pickings really easily and we want to get it going really quick so this is a no-till method you could till the soil up but we want to show you how to do this just really easy really quick so we're not going to tell anything and the first thing we've got to do is cut the grass down and get it close to the ground [Music] okay so we've weed whacker area we've knocked the grass down you want to knock it down as close to the ground as you can possibly but here's the deal you don't want to get rid of the grass you want all those clippings underneath here so we're just gonna rake them in make sure that we've got them in here that adds some good organic material and a little bit of nitrogen nice green grass spread it out kind of even okay now however you're shaping your beds you don't want to have to reach more than 24 to 30 inches at the max if you got to it from all sides and you can do it about four foot wide and still get to the middle maybe a little bit wider but not much more than that because we're against a fence I don't want this bad to be any larger than thirty inches right about in here matter of fact we will just break that into about that size so we can see let's get all our materials lined up in there alrighty so next we want to amend our soil we want to get more organic material down here and we want to get some nitrogen down here the grass is doing that another good one that you can use is your food waste from the house this is great to put in this spot to give all the biology all the little critters something to eat you're trying to feed the soil here to get this going so hopefully you're not throwing away your food scraps right and of course we don't want any stickers like that so we'll toss that one out don't throw away your food scraps try to take it and that out all right I'm gonna leave a little space for the walkway right here because eventually there's going to be a gate so we're not gonna make our bed in this part we're just going to let the grass come back so you might depending on the size of your family save up for a day or two you could layer this inch or two thick if you wanted to don't worry about it not being all composted or broken down some of you might not want bones in there I see we've got a few bones and we'll save those for the dog everybody's got food ways so I know you can do this maybe you have to save it up for a few weeks to get enough but if all you had was the grass clippings and this that's a great start that'll help you out yeah if you can get a hold of some other organic material that's great to hear I've got coffee grounds and we've got a lot of coffee drinkers in our house and we grind our own so we've got that resource if you don't have that no problem but you could go to a coffee shop a lot of them just throw it away and so you could ask them for coffee grounds but this adds some great nitrogen to your soil try to keep it organic though we only use organic beans I personally would not want non-organic coffee grounds in my garden soil they use a lot of chemicals in the production of coffee some of you might be looking at the eggshells in here and thinking well those aren't going to really break down and yeah you're right it actually taken pretty long time so if you wanted to dry those out and powder them up or something and help the process out a little bit you could sure do that and that would help but but nature will do its job over time okay so so far we've got a great start here yeah on building up some organic material and we haven't even had to buy anything specifically except for what we're already using now I also have we've got animals on the farm so doesn't hurt us to put in a little bit of manure and got a hole right there or something so we're gonna just sprinkle in a little bit of our barn waste that's going to add some more nitrogen and a little more organic matter if you've got chickens you can use your chicken manure horse manures okay not as good as chicken manure or cow manure or goats where rabbits are really great so you may not have any of this if you don't that's okay but if you can find a neighbor or somebody local that's going to be a great addition to the material in here see okay so we've got a nice base of organic material and nitrogen rich material and that is really going to get the decomposition process going down here that's your native soil level and bring in all that soil biology all of the worms and bacteria and fungal communities that you want in good healthy soil this is just help speeding that process up and they will actually loosen up your soil as they come into here down below so it's just a great soil conditioner next you want to water it you're knocking you might have a hard time getting water down here so before we cover this up we want to give it a good watering and then we're gonna get to placing cardboard we're gonna give this a real good soak really want to get it good and watered and soaked in down here the dryer you are the more draining your soil is the more wet I would want to get this to really just make sure that it it gets it kicked on and going and yeah some of you are probably gonna ask me about that electrical cord that's a temporary solution some exterior cords running to our electric fence for some temporary pasture okay so I'm done water and I've really really soaked it it's really good to get a lot of water and here again the drier you are the more you want I'm gonna just smooth it out a little I want as little air pockets in here as possible because we're going to cover this in cardboard so just trying to smooth it over not looking for it to be perfect but as flat as I can get it right next is the cardboard now if you can soak this first it's a lot better this is a little damp but it's what we've got to work with and I've gotten a little wet we're gonna wet it down some more if you've got a barrel or something you can soak it in that's really helpful because we're gonna want to get this really wet and you want non-glossy cardboard and you don't want any plastic in it and we can put it down pretty thick tape measure come out a little further than that and then get our walkway fold this a little bit get it out of the way can also just cut it let them right here and I don't have a knife I'm just gonna fold it get it to about the right size all right that's one layer I'm gonna do two layers of these but I'm gonna get them really wet in between somebody missed a little plastic don't want that plastic in there okay so the cardboard is gonna act as a nice layer to make sure that grass doesn't come back through it's also going to be some extra carbon and material for all of your worms yeah good buggies that we like in there and I just want to get this good and wet like I said if you can soak it and something that's great that's a better way to go but just get it as wet as you can I'm going to do two layers here I want this nice and thick in this area and make sure I overlap everything real well okay so I've got two thick layers of cardboard on I want to make sure all the seams are overlapped yeah and this is really going to suppress any growth this cardboard is all just going to break down and add some carbon to the soil yeah but I want to soak it again I want this cardboard as wet as it can be and again the dryer the environment you're in you really want to get this wet cuz you know you're gonna need to keep watering but it'll be hard after you get your top soil and mulch on here to get it really saturated now if you were going to be doing prepping and not doing an instant garden but just prepping a no-till bed this is great right here you wouldn't necessarily need to water this you could just put this cardboard down over all your material overlap the seams and put down a heavy mulch like six 8 2 inches and let this sit for six months through the weather and you would have a great no-till bed ready for you and so a lot of people will do this in the fall with just this and the mulch and let it sit all through winter and then in the spring they've got a bed ready to go now we're wanting obviously for this video an instant garden so we're going to do a little different approach and hence adding a lot of water in here really charging the system even got a hose you can even get underneath okay so to segue just a little bit this is a great way you can do this in a large scale if you want to do a long term garden where you want to convert a lot of sod like we did here in the cottage garden or you want to prep a no-till garden of any size so you can do exactly what we're doing here and then just mulch it and that that whole natural system is going to work for you and you'll have a ready garden but it's going to take months to get this all broken down and prepped and we don't want to wait that long we want to get some veggies going now so what we're going to do is cover this in several inches of topsoil this is the one thing that you may need to buy so far we've used everything resources that we've had on the property we do a lot of gardening so we've always got some topsoil around you may have to buy a little bit of that that's okay we're growing salad greens in this so I'm gonna put about three inches three to four inches of topsoil here that's going to give those seeds something to get started in and grow in if you wanted to plant garden starts like plants you could go ahead and mulch this and then just poke a hole in the cardboard and plant you starts and add a little bit of soil around it because you got a lot of nitrogen in there you lot of nitrogen rich material so if you're going to do that you definitely want to make a nice hole and add some top soil and compost to it but again we're trying to grow fresh greens beds here where we can grow as much food and pot as possible in this little space I'd like a nice flat bed just gonna smooth it out it's a little wet cuz I soaked it real good so might have to give it a little more time now if you've got clay soil your soil is gonna hold water our soil drains pretty well so that's one of the reasons I want everything so well soaked if you have a heavy clay you're down low you're gonna hold some soil well you're gonna hold water well this is pretty rich topsoil place I bought it from add some compost to it so this is good stuff you don't have to have this you can just have some good topsoil and then add compost to the top which we're gonna do here in a minute but just get the best you can you know we're just about getting there we've got nice even flatbeds I'm gonna check it it's nice and moist there I see I've got a little dry a few dry spots so I'm gonna go ahead and water it one more time I'd really like this all nice and damp all the way down to the cardboard don't want it muddy but I do want it damp and this is well draining soil so we're gonna just make sure we cover the dry spots so this doesn't dry out real quickly on us we're getting into June and it's going to heat up and start getting warm and you know when your water sits on top like that that you're you're it's got as much as it can hold I don't want it to start running off a whole lot okay all right now you don't have to do this next step you've got some soil and you could go right to the planning stage in this but the more nutrition the more input you can add to your soil the better you're gonna do so we're gonna top this with some compost good quality compost and if you've got really depleted soil or it's just real basic topsoil you can put a couple inches of this I'm just going to put about a half inch down we'll go under our seed bed yeah it's just really going to help charge the soil matter of fact your age so interested in helping I could use a bucket of sifted compost five gallon bucket yep take they're not the food bucket but the other one I will try he's probably gonna follow you or maybe he's going to get in our video hang out with us check all right a little bit of compost smooth that out I like to use the back end of the rake it just helps make everything nice and even flat hey we've got us an instant garden bed this is great I'm gonna add a little more water and then we're going to be ready to plant seeds all right so our beds are all ready to plant we are planting some cut all leafy greens in here yeah and I want to prep for the seeds and what I like to do to get as much out of this as I can is I'm gonna plant kind of micro green fashion very very close together about one inches apart and as they grow up we thin them and then let them grow a little more and thin them a little more and it actually allows us to have a continual harvest over time now a great way to just make your rows so they're nice and straight and the seeds get in the right place is a dowel or sometimes just a round tool like this that you can press into the soil you can see this is making a nice little trough for the seeds these little trough because they're compressed a little bit they hold water just a little better and we've got a visitor really one nobody so this is our little kitchen raised goose we hatched him in the kitchen and he actually unfortunately thinks he's human the mom abandoned the nest and so we tried to hatch him out and we got one and he won't go back with the geese so I guess he's going to help us garden all right not gonna hurt much right now yeah I know you can't be eating my seeds when I put them in here I think I was saying that these troughs because the soil is a little compressed they're gonna help hold water and they're gonna help keep these seeds moist while they're germinating because we don't want to cover them a whole lot you don't want to put much soil on them eighth to a quarter inch at the most of soil after we put the seeds in okay so we're planting lettuce in here you could do chard spinach kale any kind of leafy greens but this is going to be our summer lettuce so we've got a couple tried-and-true lettuces for us this is a lettuce called kahlúa from adaptive seeds one of our favorite and you're just going to sprinkle them in the trough we we want to go fairly thick seeds are not expensive compared to you what they grow and you can see why we only want to be you only want the bed so deep I can only reach so far and because we are not letting these grow to full heads we are cutting them as young lettuce first microgreens and then maybe when they're 2 or 3 inches and then when they're about 4 to 6 so I want a pretty dense bed of lettuce you we have got our seeds in the ground I guess they came out more like an inch and a half or two inches but that's just fine that's a good spacing anywhere from an inch to two yeah and now we just want to lightly cover them you can use use some of the same compost I like to sift the compost if you can see here it's just a little lighter doesn't have as much of the big chunks in it so this is real great for covering the seeds yeah and I know a lot of these seeds say to just barely dust them I like to go and eighth to a quarter of an inch I found I get much better germination like that just want to lightly cover them now we're doing there's these beds these instant garden beds would let us right here close to the kitchen where it's easy to get to this is a cut all lettuce Carolyn will be able to come out or somebody and just once they get growing cut them with scissors and they don't even have to be washed they're ready to eat so it's just what we needed but you could you could pant plant squash in these beds you could plant beans I suppose you could plant corn but it's not a very big bed for corn things you got to know is they're only gonna do so well the first year though because that cardboard is going to take awhile to break down yeah and your soil down below at the base is still a bit compact compacted yeah and so those deeper rooted crops well you can grow something and it's certainly worth a try and they're only going to do so well because they're just not going to be able to reach out until the second year in a bed like this unless like I said earlier you want to do transplants and you want to poke through the cardboard yeah I nod a little bit of this compost and soil down further then you could transplant in some tomatoes or peppers or whatever you want you know and get that going as well again I favor this method getting it going the first year with this lettuce cuz I can just get a whole lot of good food out of it this is about 32 square feet we did right here like 2 4x4 beds and we'll get enough lettuce out of this for our large household once it gets going we'll eat probably six to eight weeks of a salad a day maybe a little more sometimes out of these beds that's a lot of food alright lastly we want a water you got this covered with a nice compost about a eighth to a quarter inch and we want a water and you do but you do not want to water these guys real heavy you want to light water and you want to soak it but you do not want to make the soil run or pool so we want to get it just to where the soil shiny you see it's starting to sit on the top we'll do the other bed and then we'll come back and do it once yeah and when these beds get going you're really are gonna have to hand water them two to three times a day until they're sprouting till their roots can shoot down so that they don't dry off and if it's breezy you might have to do a little bit more that just comes with with light seated plants like lettuces carrots even the beets do a lot better while they're sprouting just kind of mimicking those spring or spring rains keeping the soil moist let's see if it got down I'll check between my row yeah it's a little dry in there so for this first one I'm going to water just a little more if you are overhead watering and you're using a big rotational sprinkler or make sure not to put these in that spot those are such large water droplets that they'll move your seed around and move your soil off your seed and even a heavy water like you definitely don't want to do that even that's a that's even a little heavy that's what I like the mist is a little light that one right there is just about right all right you guys there is an instant garden I've got less than three hours of work including gathering all material all my materials most of which came from the homestead here and we've got about 32 square feet that will provide six to eight weeks of salads for our family of eleven to twelve we always have in the house Plus guest sometimes so you can imagine what that can do if you're just a family of two or even four yeah and you're probably somewhere in your yard that you can do this yeah it like I said at the beginning this is a great way to fill in another spot it's a great way to get your hands into the soil and start gardening so I hope you I hope you've enjoyed this I hope it helps and I will see you soon you [Music]

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 850,735

Keywords: Homesteading, Self-Sufficiency, Permaculture, Homesteading Family, organic gardening, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden, cottage garden, gardening tips, garden planning, gardening for beginners, growing food, organic garden, vegetable garden planning, gardening advice, vegetable gardening for beginners, backyard gardening, organic gardening for beginners, organic gardening soil preparation, organic gardening vegetables, organic gardening tips, organic gardening at home

Id: SiOKxCsUDVk

Length: 33min 31sec (2011 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020