Building Raised Garden Beds for Organic Gardening with Vegetables, Flowers and Herbs

Hi I'm Doug Green from http://www.douggreensgarden.con and I want to show you how to build raised garden beds with a minimum of fuss and muss.

Carpentry comes first - The first step after nailing together the boards (they're 2x8's - 8 feet long) and it took three of them to make this rectangle. They're common spruce and not pressure treated or cedar as i wanted to make some inexpensive beds - we tend to move things around at this stage of our garden building so if they rot out in a few years, I'll simply build good ones where I know I want them to stay.



Second step dig out the weeds and grass in the bed and add a layer of compost - that's the black stuff on the ground.

Third step i building raised garden beds approximately 4x8 feet in size - add a 3.8 cubic foot bale of peat moss to the bed and spread it out evenly.




Fourth step is to add garden soil - add enough to top up the bed.

Fourth step is to mix the underlying soil, the compost, the peat and the top soil into one big mixed up rich soil.

Fifth step is to rake it all level. Note I'm not standing on the bed any more. The next person to walk on this bed gets yelled at big time. Once you make wonderfully aerated soil such as this, you do not walk on it.

Celebrate! This bed will now grow anything and in our case with our shallow clay soils, this is almost a necessary garden building project to give us enough growing space in our landscaping for food production.

Finished! The only two tools used (besides a saw and hammer) were the shovel and rake. Energy consumed - about one half pound of gardener's winter-stored fat. Energy absorbed - being out in the sun and working in my garden - infinite. This gardener is solar-powered.

And that my friends is how you build raised garden beds.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• raised garden beds
• flowers
• vegetables
• howto
• organic
• soil
• gardening
• containers
• construction
• landscaping
• compost
• weeds
• tools

[theracemixer]

What is the diffrenc between topsoil and garden soil ?

[headgardener2u]

@theracemixer top soil is the upper layers of garden soil - the best stuff, usually higher in organic matter.

[gardenvespers777]

loll Yes there is a purpose to "store the fat" over the winter!! I completely agree!!

[sugerbear520]

nice

[theracemixer]

@headgardener2u

Thanks for the information.

[MZMStudios]

When I built my raised beds I didn't use pressure treated lumber either... of course, I didn't use good soil, so I was less than happy with the results... so I tore it apart and re-used the wood. After almost a full year in the elements, the wood was still in decent shape. I think it may have lasted another 2-3 years... at least another year.

Great video!