MAKING RAISED GARDEN BEDS FROM IBC TOTES

[Music] hi g'day welcome to farming live australia this video is going to be about building some new garden beds out of ibc totes i've been using them for years now and i only use the pretty worn out ones after we finish with them for molasses the molasses being so heavy we don't take any chance on them breaking so we bush them once they get a bit old this is the tote i'm going to use today you can see it's pretty old one but doesn't matter it'll be fine one thing to consider with these totes when you make anything out of them is what has been in them these ones here had a fairly innocuous chemical in them not a problem and they were washed out before i got them i washed them out again and then they've had molasses in them for about three years i'm confident there'd be nothing in there that would hurt you for growing a garden in the tools i'll be using is this reciprocating saw it's a battery one to cut it and i got a pair of fencing pliers as well the fencing pliers to get these bits of tin off fairly straightforward to lever the tin up just here's a little piece of a little piece of the tin wrapped around the pipe with a spot weld but you can but you can break that off fairly easily like so now these particular pods hold a thousand liters and i believe you can get bigger ones and they're broken up into one two three four five equal sections so what i do is i cut through the middle of the middle section that will mean the garden bed off this side will be slightly taller than off this side but i don't let that worry me if that worries you you have to prop it up on some bricks or something to make them all level so what i do is i just mark about the middle of the thing i don't measure it you can if you want to and then i give myself a bit of a line on the plastic [Music] [Music] it's simply a matter of turning the toad over now and just keep going until you go right round the whole thing [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] that bit of molasses that's in there i'm not going to worry about that i'll just leave it there it won't do any harm everything it'll probably do the garden good and you can see here there's a slight difference in the height i don't care about that the height of this comes up just above my knee so that's quite convenient to weed the garden and work on it as i said if you want them higher than that just pack them up like all gardens i suppose we need to consider the drainage in them and with this system that's not really a problem because they have a filler cap in the top which i take off and in the bottom there's a valve and i just leave the valve open and that seems to give plenty of drainage doesn't seem to be a problem there is only one thing where i take the cap off but just make one small alteration i remove the lid and discard it and so that this doesn't seal onto the ground i cut a couple of cuts in this rim to make sure the water can get out that's what it looks like on the ground now but you'll find that the center will push down with the weight of dirt in it with the other one i just leave the open and that gives plenty of drainage this is the site that i've got prepared where i'm going to put these pods and there's a lot more area prepared than i need for these two this is where i'm going to place them and you can see they've got plenty of walkway right around they've got ground covering so weeds shouldn't grow up around them the next step that i do is i put big pieces of log in the bottom of the totes and this achieves a couple of things you can see the size of them compared to my hand they're probably about seven or eight inches from side to side some are say only six inches that's the sort of thing i'm using just make sure whatever you do don't use treated timber this is what the containers look like after i've put the pieces of hardwood in if you don't have access to any timber like this it's probably not the end of the world you could use rocks or something it'll still achieve the purpose of taking up a bit of room so you don't have to use so much soil but the thing with the timber is the timber in the bottom of the pods creates an environment that's suitable to keep nourishing your garden the next step i'll do is collect some all broken down hay with droppings in it from the cattle yard and i'll put a layer of that on top before i put the soil in the hay in the bottom with the droppings will do two things obviously it's going to give nutrient to the garden also because the hay is in there and it's breaking down it's going to create a store of moisture that the rest of the garden can access in dry time through wicking and because we have drainage it will ensure that we don't wind up with too much water in there we collect the oil broken down hay out of the yards with the loader and just take it up and shovel it out of the bucket into the garden beds [Music] we try and get the loader bucket as close as we can to the job to make it as easy as possible most people i imagine are going to do this with a wheelbarrow it's a good idea to put more of this in than you think you need because it will break down and compact down after a while and you can fill your pod right up the very top with soil and it will go down after a season you'll find you'll have to put more soil in there probably only need eight inches of topsoil over the top of this i wouldn't have much less than that but that'll be plenty [Music] if you have no access to this type of thing and i understand most people won't what i'd put in here instead is old leaves grass clippings anything like that will be suitable instead of this the only thing i like about this it has a lot of manure in it so it adds nutrients to the garden last step before planting is to put some topsoil in up to the top and we're going to do that now the topsoil i use is stuff that i've made out of the old hay and manure from the cattle yards and it's charged with biochar green matter i add some grass clippings by the time we use it it's usually a couple of years old thanks a lot for watching this edition of farming live australia we'll see you next time

Channel: Farming Life Australia

Views: 11,661

Keywords: raised garden beds from IBC totes, make raised garden beds, make raised garden beds cheap

Id: QVj3e2Wz0_Y

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2022