Turn Your Lawn Into Free Groceries in Days | How to Put in a New Garden

so this year we knew that we really needed to increase the amount of vegetables that we were growing just with everything that's been going on we wanted to make sure that we were providing our own food for our own family and in order to make sure that we could do that we had to have more growing room but normally when we put in a brand new garden bed on something that's been lawn or field we start during late winter and early spring will lay down plastic to kill back all of the grass and all of the weeds but this year we didn't have that luxury in fact we're putting in this brand new garden bed we ended putting it putting it in in June which is really late for planting corn and potatoes but we're going to go for it so one of the first things that you want to make sure when you're putting in a vegetable garden is pretty much all of your vegetables need at least six plus hours of full Sun so there's a couple of ways that you can go about getting this to be dirt because obviously we cannot plant in this grassy area that if you're planning far enough ahead you can use black plastic which we have done in the past and laid that down we'll do it in the fall if we know we want to put a new bread in in the spring or even in the winter months if there's not a bunch of snow on the ground and you can lay down black plastic and that is going to the heat of the black plastic as well as lack of sunlight will help to kill any grass and/or weeds or anything that's growing on that if you can leave it down long enough but we decided to put in at this new garden bed and right now it's June the very beginning of June so I don't have time to do any type of black plastic work to kill the grass so we're going to be using a damn tractor [Music] so now that we have our first pass through where you have the tines set pretty high so we're not going really deep yet we're just trying to basically just get that grass broken up and on the top surface so now that we've had that first pass through you don't want to just keep working that grass into the ground because if there's those root masses there and there's the root from this grass then you want to get that out of there or it's just going to keep growing and you're gonna be battling it you're gonna battle the grass if you have an area that's been grass and you're turning it into a garden bed you are going to be battling grass no matter what the first growing season or two and really you're gonna battle grass always but it gets a little bit more easy to manage but one of the things that we've learned that helps the most is just doing this this quick kind of rough part where we're just kind of getting those roots broken up and then we're gonna remove them with a rake so of course this is not going to get every single part removed but if we can get the large chunks with the larger root masses out of here then that's just less that's going to grow back later once we've planted [Music] so now that we've got the first run-through done and we've raked out those it's time to go through that again let's see if that weight lifting is paid off and I can get this started up by myself without my husband helping [Music] okay guys so I have went over this four times but now we're gonna let it rest a couple of reasons it actually has been pouring rain on and off so it's getting to be really wet and we've got it tilled up to the point now where you can't really rake any more of the grass out and those roots out so we have found when we're doing new garden beds that if you can let it go like two to three days in between and let it rest then the grass that's really wet and the clumps that are left in there now even though they're they're smaller so once they get to be small it's you can't really wake them all out it's just not possible so we found that if you let it rest for about two to three days then of course that grass will begin to die which is great because then it's easier once it starts to dry out and it's dead then you can kind of chop that back in when we do the next tool so right now it's just a little bit too wet what's left it's not getting worked in I mean in a normal year it wouldn't matter if I had to wait an extra week to have my ground ready to put in my potatoes in corn but because we started this new bed so late every single day matters that I'm waiting before I'm getting these crops in the ground and I'm cutting it really close to when our first average frost state comes to when these would actually be producing food and they may overlap guys so welcome back we have been extremely wet and rainy today is actually the first day that we have had sunshine and no rain and well over a week so I am now going to do one more pass through with the rototiller just to get any last bits of those roots and grass clumps and clods broken up and then this will be ready for our very first planting [Music] so one of the things that you really want to consider when you're putting in a new garden bed is your soil health now ideally a soil test is going to give you the most accurate results so you know if you do need to amend or not to amend based on specific micro and macro nutrients as well as pH level but we do not have time to do a soil test now most County Extension offices will do a soil test either for free or for just a few dollars our County is one of the few actually in Washington State that does not offer that service so I'll provide some links beneath hairs for some of the labs that we've used in the past but I'm hitting this super late and so I am really pushing the envelope for being able to plant the corn I got some varieties that are only 75 to 85 days so at the time of planting them it's mid-june and we can get an early for us to your mid-september usually it's the 1st of October so I am like fingers crossed that that frost has not come until the first part of October so that this corn actually has long enough to reach maturity so that we can harvest it but we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna do it but I don't have time to wait for a soils has to give it in the ground so a couple of visual cues that you can use if you're like me and you don't have the time to do a soil test right now is to actually look at the color of the dirt so if it is a dark brown like this this is a very dark brown dirt then that means it has a lot of organic matter in it and it's pretty healthy soil if you see something that's red or really light gray those are indications that that soil health is poor and it needs to have compost added to it broken-down composted manure that type of thing to really add some more nutrients to it we also want to know by drainage so if you have a really hard clay soil that doesn't drain very well then that's an issue and you're going to want to build that up with doing compost is a great way to build that soil up so that it can drain better and get some good aeration in there I do not have clay soil so drainage is not really issue for me on the opposite hand of clay soil you can have sandy soil where you don't have compaction issues or poor draining but if it's really sandy soil the water is going to go through it so fast that it's gonna have a hard time sustaining plant life so kind of on both ends of the spectrum really sandy soil really clay soil you're going to need to build that soil up and one of the best ways to build soil up is with compost and doing composted manure and getting a lot of you can do leaf mulching there's lots of different ways that you can do mulching but compost and mulching are really going to add to that soil and build it up so we're getting ready to plant and one of the things that you want to think about before you put your rose in and you actually plant your crops with your new garden is you want to think about how large the crops are going and the direction of the sunlight that is my Sun that is just starting to go down in the West but this is my southern exposure [Music] [Music] even though we got a super late start couldn't use our normal techniques we finally got this new garden bed in and the corn and the potatoes are both coming up and growing and because everything else was stunted by all of the cold weather and the rain that we had in June now it's July actually got everything planted the last part of June which is like four weeks later than we should have done they are quickly catching up because they are now getting the sunshine and the warm weather that we were missing earlier in the season and the other good thing is even if we do get early for us and it kills my corn before it's ready to harvest I'll still get a potato harvest because I am well I don't know about saying a pro but I'm pretty good at using cold frames to grow our vegetables and the potatoes will be small enough that I can use several different cold frames and protect them so that they can grow and the potatoes can get a little bit larger even if we get close to some of those for us and those cold temps that's just slowed everything down Plus potatoes you can actually plant in the fall and let them just stay in the ground and then they will produce your early spring potatoes for you they're a lot more frost and cold tolerant then you're gonna get when it comes to corn also make sure that you check out this video for more you can see our high tunnel and that's the only way that we can grow our Tomatoes which is basically a huge cold frame growing as much of our own food as possible right here on our land using modern homesteading is so important for both our health and our self-sufficiency [Music]

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 41,553

Keywords: grow your own food, organic gardening, vegetable garden, self sufficiency, new garden bed preparation, new garden bed over grass, create new garden bed, making new garden beds, tilling new garden bed

Id: gzvzPHb2T-k

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020