Two year RAISED BED update! Does Hügelkultur work?

welcome back to the homestead everybody it's a beautiful march day here in kansas city and i wanted to take this time on this beautiful day and give you guys a two year update on the raised beds oh [Music] so if you haven't seen the original video where i build this four by twelve raised bed i did it two years ago like i said and i'll leave a link down in the description below you can go check that out also i did a six month update video i'll leave that in the description below as well and i thought it'd be appropriate now that sometimes gone by to update everybody on how these beds are holding up also what the soil quality is like and how the huge culture method is going as well as some additional details on stuff that we encountered along the way so let's get right into it so the first thing i want to cover is just how well the beds are holding up so far as the wood as many of you know if you've seen that original video i chose to not use treated lumber on these beds so everything we have here is untreated so i wanted to show you some of the corners and some of the areas that could potentially break down right and so uh you know even the cracks that were initially left in some of these pieces of wood from the nails these are all still in good shape all of my corners are still you know in in good shape i think one of my bigger concerns was the contact of the dimensional lumber on the soil and so let me show you exactly what i'm talking about so down here obviously this is where the lumber contacts the soil and you can kind of see you know that's where rot would start to develop if it was going to develop which eventually it will um but two years in and that's what we got and this is the first original bed that we built so if we're not getting rotten this bed yet then obviously it's not going to be in the other ones yet so as far as the wood holding up on the bed we're good it's it's holding together really well so this is our strawberry bed behind me and um i was coming through the garden with my skid steer and i hit the corner of it and knocked it apart so let me show you this is the corner that i kind of destroyed and had to repair but one interesting thing happened when i was going to repair it is the soil because it's in this shape it didn't fall apart it didn't like pour out the side or anything like that because it's been so long in this kind of structured rectangle it didn't fall apart so honestly at the end of the day if this bed were to fall apart the wood were to rot out i could probably rebuild the entire bed without the soil falling out and so that's something to notate you know when you're trying to get cheaper lumber the other thing i wanted to talk about was inflation so obviously i built built these beds originally for right around just under 100 that's not the case anymore we have you know skyrocketing lumber prices that you know started to go down and then now they're back kind of where they were you know building materials are outrageous so these beds are no longer 100 bucks to build uh depending on where you are they're probably about 250 something like that last the last couple beds that we built because we're still finishing off the the uh raised bed garden here um i think we spent around 250 dollars so if you watch that original video and you go to build one for a hundred dollars and you realize oh that's not going to work anymore it's because that was two years ago and now it's gonna be more than double the price [Music] all right let's talk about soil so as many of you know if you watch that original video we got our soil from a local organic soil supplier here in kansas city we liked it okay it wasn't the best soil we felt like it had a little bit too much sand in it and which didn't allow for some of the water to actually saturate into the bed but the biggest thing is we have dropped our soil level you know probably six inches here in this first bed this bed was originally filled up all the way to the top and because we're using the huge culture method i'll leave i'll leave a link in the description below you can learn more about hugo culture from one of my other videos or if you want to look more into it just research it but basically you put you know sticks logs leaves all that good organic material at the bottom of your bed and then you put your soil on top that way when it breaks down it holds some of that moisture and then you get some good organic material lots of nutrients that develop over time so it's it's really a long term plan here for the beds so because of that you know over time this soil sinks in to the cracks and crevices of every piece of material we have below on the bottom of the bed and we we lose a lot of soil we don't lose it but it sinks in every single year so now we're two years in this bed is definitely due for um for some more soil so what we're gonna do because we didn't love this original soil but we had to get we have to get something in here that's gonna raise up the level a little bit more is i went ahead and got some compost from the same supplier the compost that they have is a lot better for absorbing water retaining water and obviously it has a lot of nutrients so one thing we're gonna do with this bed today is we're gonna take our compost and we're gonna we're gonna kind of it's not a mending but we're gonna amend the soil here and mix it in with our current soil because of this issue with so much sand so we're gonna really supplement this bed with compost basically the other thing we did and we've been doing on these beds is we take our chicken manure and we we mix it in over the winter you can take your chicken manure you can mix it in no issues it it'll burn off and and and all of the bad things that putting direct chicken manure on your bed does uh you can kind of you can get away with it during the winter because we're not growing in these beds so we let the snow fall on them we let the rain fall on it and kind of soaks in and it starts to break down that chicken manure to make it good and healthy for the spring so we've been amending these beds with chicken manure and then like i said today we're going to go ahead and put and raise up this level and put some compost into the soil [Music] foreign dig down [Music] uh [Music] it's composed [Music] when you step in a pocket it's really deep and you go under the door like your leg goes under the door [Music] all right so man that was a full day you might be wondering why we were stepping on the beds and pretty much stomping on them i had the kids go through and just stomp on every part of the bed i was doing that because the soil's starting to sink down into the cracks and crevices and so when you step on a spot you're literally your whole foot would go through one of the areas and so i want to close some of those air pockets they're nice to some degree but not that big they were very big air pockets so wanted to close those up get those get more soil and those cracks and crevices so that's why we were walking on them plus the convenience of just being able to do that all right so we got these beds filled up we actually did a mixture of the compost and the soil mix that our local soil supplier sells and we're super happy with it turns out it's much better than the last load we got they actually sell a raised garden bed mix that has uh fine pine in it which is come on get away from me pig all right let's take an intermission say hi to thunder she's annoying me right now rooting up my legs and everything you get in the bed how about that there super happy with this uh load of soil that we got we did one two three four five almost five of our beds and obviously we had to take care of some of the settling like i said i expect that we're not gonna have to worry about settling in the future my guess is you know with all of the logs and sticks and branches and the leaves that we had down in the the bottom with the hugelkultur method just over time that stuff breaks down and so it's gotta slip through the cracks and crevices and all that stuff and anyway i think we'll be good in the future obviously we'll have to top these off every single year and that'll be a normal thing that we do we'll add compost we're gonna get a compost system going here on the homestead and so we'll be able to supply that ourselves but overall guys i wanted to update you on what's been happening with these raised beds how they're holding up two years later and i can without a doubt say these things are strong even if you don't use treated wood i think you're going to be fine like i said before even if you have to pull a piece of lumber off of here and replace it i've done it before and they come off really easily especially if you use screws i use nails initially which was not the best idea if you use screws just unscrew take your piece of lumber off that's rotted or cracked or whatever happens to it replace it screw it back in so there's nothing to worry about there these things are holding up nicely we are super happy with them we have uh one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 so far and we're going to be adding another 10 or 11 here uh throughout the summer all right guys that's it stay tuned because i'm going to be doing a irrigation video on this raised bed system that i have over here on this side of the property we're going to be installing a complete zone system it's going to be a like a miniature sprinkler system basically so stay tuned for that video and i'm also going to be doing a giveaway during that video so we're gonna give away three of those sprinkler sets uh so stay tuned for that if you have any questions or comments on your experience building these raised beds please leave it in the comment section below i'm happy to answer those go through anything that i've have experience with and building these and growing inside of them as you can see we're ramping up for the gardening season and uh we are super excited this year one of our friends she posted on i think it was instagram the other day and she said i live for spring and that's what i feel like i'm doing right now with the weather change out here in the midwest it's been absolutely gorgeous anyway guys stay tuned for the irrigation video for these raised beds and also stay tuned for our first vineyard video that we're going to be putting out here in the next couple weeks that's going to be updates and us showing you how we uh prepared the other side of the property to get ready to uh plant our grapes which we'll be getting those in the next week here thanks for watching everybody remember if you haven't already go ahead and hit that subscribe button hit the little notification bell and hit all and you'll get all of our notifications when we release videos so we will see in the next video thank you so much for watching

Channel: Goshen Farm and Gardens

Views: 29,866

Keywords: Raised Bed, Raised Bed Gardening, Gardening, Homesteading, Hügelkultur

Id: mSKVJE0Spw0

Length: 13min 26sec (806 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022