NO-DIG Raised Garden Bed for Beginners

[Music] [Music] what are you doing she absolutely loves sitting on the compost pile and climbing all over it you would think that i put it here for her pleasure and fun rather than being the heart of the new vegetable garden we're going to need a lot of compost and this is the start of hopefully a lot of homemade compost because i'm going to use tons i'm going to be using it in the borders the new beds and today i am going to be starting to build my very first bed here in the garden very exciting but it's with compost that i've had to buy in from a local organic compost maker and it wasn't cheap spoke about it in my last video anyway it's my birthday or was my birthday last week and josh got me the most amazing birthday gift he got me a garden shredder and it's essentially a piece of kit that will chop up shrubs and sticks anything that's within four centimeters in diameter you can put it right through in it it cuts it up into small bits then i can then put in the compost pile [Music] [Music] so you remember there was a pile over here it is all in this bag i have this lovely bag full of that massive pile now and this can go directly on the compost pile you'll see that i have built it with pallets i've been doing this for years i have a video from what five years ago showing how to make these it's really no big project really you just slap four together and i've used bailing twine again i do use screws sometimes so the ones at the allotment are screwed together but bailing twine or something that's really sturdy like that rope will do just as as well and normally at the allotment i've been putting permius or permeable landscaping fabric on the sides and the bottom and that just helps to keep weeds from growing inside and grass from growing up through the bottom and roots growing into the compost pile i ran out of landscaping fabric i just had enough for the bottom here so i've lined it with cardboard and i'm going to be covering it with a square of polythene just to keep it from getting too wet keep it from getting infiltrated with seeds and all of our kitchen waste is going in here as well as the clippings from the lawn bits of the border but i'm doing a really good mix i'm not going to be piling in all of the grass clippings or piling in all of the brown material i'm going to try to keep it mixed up so that it heats up nicely and it breaks down easily into something that i can use so i'm going to now tip this in inside right now it's just basically some kitchen waste and some foliage from the tomatoes in the greenhouse i've been trying to trim those from the bottom up to encourage the fruits to ripen a little bit quicker and then i'm just going to put this on top [Music] it's been a couple of days since i recorded that last clip and in that time i've built my very first new bed new garden bed at the home garden what do you think it's a good size good compost in here and it was relatively easy to build and i'm going to go through all of the steps in just a second but i just want to give you an introduction to what this is this is a no-dig garden bed with some modifications it follows charles dowding's methods and essentially it's an easy way to create gardening space and there's no real digging over the soil necessary and i won't be digging this in the years to come and you can grow anything in here that you could in a traditional garden bed or flower bed even and it's just dead easy the bed itself is about four foot wide and about 12 foot long and it is approximately about six inches deep and i've filled it with a combination of a weed suppressant material that will break down and also compost now i've had to bring in this compost which is aged manure because i don't have any compost at hand but i also plan on bringing in manure regularly that is the main mulch that i use in the allotment garden and the bed itself is to help keep the compost where it's supposed to be especially while this bed is just forming and you'll see that i've held it together with stakes this frame is not going anywhere and this should be ready for planting by next spring but technically i could start planting in this right now so if you wanted to build a no-dig bed yourself you could do all the steps that i'm going to take you through in just a second and then directly plant into that compost [Music] so it's taken me a little bit longer than i thought to build this first bed and that's because i had a little bit of a dilemma at first the garden itself is on a slope just like all of my other gardens in the past and that means that i do have to deal with a bit of erosion especially in winter and we are now going into autumn and it will be winter the rains will come and they will be sheeting down this this incline this slope here so although i started this project without wanting to put the wooden sides this wooden box on i decided it's probably a good idea so my first step after that after marking this out and putting out cardboard and changing my mind was to go and buy some wood and i bought the timber from a local builders merchant that's a lumber yard for those of you across the pond and it's just completely bog standard untreated wood which probably technically has only a lifespan of about five years but that's what i use in the allotment and some of those planks are 10 years old so i'm not too concerned about them rotting away quickly and what they'll do is they will hold all of the goodness where it needs to be once the wood was delivered the next step was cutting it into the right pieces the long sides of my bed the wood came in that size about 12 foot but i had to cut down the shorter sides and i also had to cut the six pegs that i'm using for stability and to get the frame set in the grounds my beds are 12 foot long for a couple of reasons first of all that's how long the wood was that i bought it was the longest that i could find of that type of wood and that depth so they're long because of that but also because i chose these beds to be long and situated this way here at the top of the garden is where i'm going to have the main veg patch because further on down down the slope into the garden is where i'm going to be putting things like trees and polytunnels things with height things that are going to be restricting the light that's coming from the south here as far as the width is concerned it's about four foot wide so i can reach into the center from wherever i am around it and four foot wide is a standard width for raised beds and garden beds in general once i had all of the wood at the right sizes cut down the next thing that i did was i screwed in the supporting pegs on the longer planks of wood so all three of them went down so one on either end one in the center and i situated them against the plank about an inch down from the top and i found with our pathways and also our beds at previous gardens that having that peg flush with the top of the of the bed itself it looks a little bit ugly it's totally fine it's totally practical if you want to have it flush but i put it down just a little bit lower just so that i can disguise it now once i had all of those pegs screwed in i screwed all four sides together and created the box shape it looks like it was on stilts because of those supporting pegs and i chose to do that so the pegs came down about seven inches and the next step was digging them into the ground this is an optional step and i've only done that is because i'm on a slope i want the bed to stay in place and this is what we did for the raised beds at the previous home garden as well again on a slope if you are gardening on flatland you don't need to do that at all you don't have to dig in those pegs you can just simply create pegs that are the same kind of length as your planks and just set the box wherever you'd like on the ground the next step after getting the frame sunk into the ground was covering all of the grass with a thick layer of cardboard and the cardboard that i used was a bit wet but it was perfectly fine and i made sure to cover every little patch where i could see grass poking through because any of those areas could allow space for plants to grow right through and right through the compost and technically at this point you could then cover it with compost which is what i did i slogged five wheelbarrow loads of well-aged horse manure up this slope and put it in about two inches but you can go up to six inches technically you could plant into that immediately this could be considered done right now and if you are in spring or summer you could start sowing seeds and start planting into it and you would have a completed bed without any digging whatsoever but i decided to do an additional step because of what i discovered when i was digging the holes for the pegs i've also noticed in digging those holes that i have quite a few weeds perennial difficult weeds to deal with in here and they are the same ones that you see growing over here there's dock you can see there there's field bindweed which you can see here and there's a massive clump right here and there's also nettles and if you look along the bank here josh keeps us pretty well cut back but if you look closely you'll see there's some nettles in here you can see there's one right there it's the middle of september here so we're getting to the tail end of summer we're going into autumn and i don't plan on growing anything in this bed until spring and because of that bindweed and the nettles i'm a little bit concerned about and other plants popping up through the compost i've decided that i'm going to cover this bed and leave it for the winter and i'm going to use landscaping fabric which i'll recycle and use in other places in the garden because it basically blocks out seventy percent of sunlight so that will stop or help stop any plants from growing up through and and thriving and also it allows moisture through and to the compost which is important for the soil organisms underneath you can use black polythene as well and i use that in other parts of the garden today is basically a really exciting day because this grassy area is starting to look a little bit like a garden it's almost like plonking in little bits i've got the compost area i've got this first bed i can start to see the garden coming to life and this is the first no dig bed of many i use quite a lot of compost which is why making compost is going to be a top priority for me next year and forever basically because no dick beds like this will need a top up of compost every year not much maybe about an inch maybe a couple of inches but that helps to keep the soil underneath fed and for you to produce healthy bountiful crops if you would like to learn a little bit more about how i make compost i have a video that you can watch next and also if you are interested in a bit more information on the shredder that i got for my birthday i'll leave information for that in the video description below and also links for both let me know if you have any questions thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time here on lovelygreens bye for now [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Lovely Greens

Views: 49,272

Keywords: allotment, grow your own, vegetable gardening, allotment gardening, gardening tips, gardening, edible garden, garden, kitchen garden

Id: ZsJ9A8jDMis

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021