- What do you do if
you've got a raised bed and you have gophers, deer, voles, birds, whatever the case may be, how do you actually
protect your raised bed? Well, in this video, we're gonna show you our ultimate solution for protecting a raised bed
from every single type of pest. So the first thing you want to do is really it's about placement initially. I know that this particular
area has some gophers. - Oh yeah. - I know we've got
raccoons that come through, skunks and opossums, let alone, you know, your birds and all your other pests. So if you can, you just wanna
avoid that, but we can't here. I need to put asparagus in. This is the area that we've chosen. And so the first thing you
wanna do is just prep the land. So I have the bed laid out here. This is actually a combined version of our Birdies 8-in-1 bed. We put two together and
put some bracing kits on. Cool little system. But the first thing we wanna do Jacques, is just move this outta the way. - Yeah. - Level the soil. And then we'll get to our
triple threat bottom prep. We'll just pop it down here real quick. - I'm gonna dig out a little bit of this bermuda that I see on the edges. - Yeah. It's a good time as you're leveling, to just take the weeds
out that you do see, especially something like a bermudagrass, which can be pretty gnarly. We're gonna protect from
it, but why not remove it if you're leveling the soil out anyways? - And I like using the back
of my rake a lot of times for stuff like this, it's pretty nice. - I think this is an
underrated part of bed setup because the aesthetics do, to me, matter a lot in the garden. And if something's nice and
level, it just really helps with the whole look and
feel of your garden. We think it's level, we're
gonna do a quick test fit and then we'll just adjust
from there with a level. Yeah. We're a little off right now, but it's okay because we need to lay down the first part of the
triple threat bottom prep, which is going to be the landscape fabric. Part one is gonna be
something very classic in the garden that we
typically don't use a lot of. - Right. - But, it certainly can help, especially you have a really gnarly weed, so that's just landscape fabric. So what we're gonna do
is I'll have Jacques grab one side of it here. We'll just roll it out like
this across our whole bed area. And we'll actually go
a little bit further, just to make sure that
we have good overlapping. I'll come all the way out. I'm actually gonna grab
a stake Jacques and- - Yeah, I'll get this corner. - Stake down the corners before I cut it. And then when you put down your next roll, you don't match it up
perfectly with the edge. You overlap it by at
least six inches or so. So we'll come in and just
map that to about there. Let's bring it over just
a little more Jacques. - Okay. - Right about there looks good. And what I'm gonna do now is
pin down just a little bit in the middle here. You wanna toss that one
there? Yeah, perfect. Great. And for good measure,
'cause we're not sure if this is exactly the size of the bed, we'll just do one more
layer right over here. Yeah. We can do a pretty
aggressive overlap here. - Yeah. That's probably good. Oh awesome. - Pretty much right
exactly what we needed. Our landscape layer is down. Next up, is what's called hardware cloth. It is not a cloth at all. It's actually a metal mesh. This is half inch hardware cloth. Don't know why it's named that. It's actually very misleading. But what we want to do is basically the same exact process, cutting and overlapping. And we're using the Felco CP clippers. You can just use any
sort of tin snip as well, but this one's great
'cause it makes its way through some plant material, but also it'll destroy
this hardware cloth. So let's unwrap this and get this going. Our hardware cloth is down. That is gonna be
preventing pretty much all of your digging pests. Now, this is not a stainless
steel hardware cloth. You could certainly go that route. And in fact, we probably
want to develop something like that at Epic Gardening, because galvanized is strong
and it's gonna last for years. - Yeah. - But eventually it probably will rust out and maybe then you'll
have some digging issues, but this is gonna prevent
your gophers, your voles, your moles for many, many years. The final step in the
triple threat bottom prep is just cardboard. So I have some ram board
here actually left over from an old project. Jacques, we've got, I think
a old cardboard frame box or something like that. It doesn't really matter. The whole point here
is just one final layer of protection that is pretty much free. So let's just do the same exact process. - Cool. - This one, we're not going to stake down. We're just going to lay flat
and then place it on the bed. Only thing left to do
now is to place the bed. And if it's not level, we can always shore it up
with a little soil on top. Our bed's in place. There's one quick note I wanna make. If you're working with a wooden bed, especially for the landscape
fabric and the hardware cloth, a good idea is to flip
your bed upside down and actually just staple
it directly to the bottom, which we did with our herb bed over there. But since this is a metal bed, you just overlap slightly and you can cover the rest with mulch. Now, we've protected the bottom. We need to protect the top from, for us, things like cabbage moths. But certainly if you're
in an area with deer or with other flying pests,
then here's what we're gonna do. We have some conduit, this is three quarter
inch electrical conduit, which you can get pretty much anywhere in the world where you are. And then Jacques got a
special little box here, of? - This is a conduit maker pipe kit. So the idea of this is
that you could build whatever structure you want with these fittings that are in the box. - Yeah. So what we're gonna do
now is, because again, it's a metal bed. You can do this with a wood bed too, but specifically with these Birdies, you can actually screw
it directly to the bolts. So we're gonna undo some of these bolts. We'll start cutting this up and show you exactly how we do it. So the first thing I'm
gonna do is remove the first and probably fourth bolt. - Okay. - Just to get a little
bit of leverage there, make sure that we're not
doing anything too crazy. - For the height of the conduit, are we thinking like five feet? - I think about five feet up. - Okay. - So however low we go, plus
five feet on top of that. Right? So we'll go about here and
then we'll go up a little bit. - Okay.
- Yeah. - I see. - If you have filled the bed up and you're sort of retrofitting, you can actually just dig down and install it this way, but the beauty of the maker pipe kit and the conduit sort of set up is you could even just
build it outside your bed, use some rebar to stake
it into the ground. - Yeah. - And you could make,
perhaps a shade cloth. I mean the flexibility of a kit like this is really second to none. - Yeah. I mean, there's so many different ways you could approach it. Like up front, we
actually have it on rebar, outside the bed. - Looks like Bobca wants
to watch you Jacques. Bobca is not a pest, but she'll
be out of this bed as well. - There it is. - Perfect. It's just that easy. So while you're cutting, Jacques, I am going to go ahead and install. - Perfect. - So the way that the beds go together in this particular case is
just a bolt and a nut, right? So all we're gonna do, is on the interior, we're in a sandwich one
of these right here, and then we're gonna put the nut on. So it's actually quite simple. You just wanna make sure that you decide which
way you want it to be and map that on every single one. I'm just gonna loose fit it,
then I'll put my conduit in. And I'm mapping the bottom edge directly to the bottom of that last one there. - [Jacques] Gotcha. - So I'm getting all the
height out of it I can. So we have our uprights done, but now we need to create the frame and there's a kind of a
clever little way to do it. - Yeah. So these little corner pieces here, the way this works is
that there's an outer part and the inner part in two bolts. And so what happens is
you could slip this on over the top of your edge pieces and I just have it on loose, so that I could kind of visualize
how I'm gonna set this up. So that creates a perfect 90 degree angle. So we could take this piece and I'll tie in this more as we do it. But basically, this will sit
in here, it'll tighten on. - Yep. - And then we can put
another piece there, cut it, and we'll have a nice rigid frame. - Yep. And then if we wanted to, we
could even split it in half and throw another line
crossbeam down this way, if you wanted to. There's all sorts of different connectors. You can actually use
this as a string trellis. In fact, Jacques, your garden. - Yep. - You've done this, but you could cover. But instead, you decided to
use more of a string trellis and then another trellis
on the other side. - You could even do both. - You could do both. Yeah. So it's very flexible. It's very cool. But for the purposes of pest removal, you'll see what we're building here is the ability to block
off the top of the bed. - Exactly. - Let's get all these fixtures
in place and get onto it. - Instead of measuring this
to the exact right dimension, it's easier to just put it in one side and then we're gonna
come in with a marker, and what you wanna do is
you wanna get on the other, the inside of where that bolt is. So it doesn't have to be exact, 'cause there's quite a
lot of space inside there. So I'm gonna go in right there. I don't know if that marked,
that felt like it marked. And then I'll go ahead
and cut that to size. - The only thing left to do
is just put the crossbeams in. We're gonna do these at 49 inches, but of course, when you're
designing the system, whatever bed you are doing, the depth of that is pretty much what you want to cut those to. - Yep. - So the basic frame is done. And as we fill this bed up with soil, Jacques and I are gonna talk about the about three or four different toppings you can add to the system. It really depends on the type of pest that you're dealing with. So for us, what we really
want to think about is if you've got birds, then bird netting might be a good option. If you have flying pests,
plus you have a heat problem, then shade cloth is
gonna be a good option. If you have frost as an issue, you can go with frost cover, 'cause frost cover is going to prevent all your flying insects as well. The only thing I would caution against is if you do something
like a bird netting, you end up running into this issue where smaller insects can get through and if it's not really
far away from your plants, even birds can land and kind of get in. And so I think I would typically
recommend a shade cloth or a frost cover. - Yeah. - One or the other is
gonna be your best bet. - They give you some good ventilation too. I mean, if you wanna get,
if you have things like rats and it's a serious battle, then you could also consider
putting hardware cloth around this. You could do that using either clips or just zip ties or wire. - So as we fill this up, I'm gonna show you how we
did it out in the front yard with our San Juan cabbage,
Toronto giant cabbage. But this is the way to
pretty much prevent any pest from getting into your garden. Remember, we triple lined the bottom and then we've created a frame on the top. So you can basically
prevent whatever you want, even deer, so long as you're
using a good enough cover here. So as we fill this bed up,
hopefully this was helpful. Let us know what you wanna
see next down in the comments. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
