 Welcome, welcome everybody. Good night. This is Tom Cobb here, the North Court of State University and we're here at the 2017 NDSU spring fever garden forums. Today is April 10th, 2017 and tonight is the fourth of our four forums in which we bring NDSU experts to you to help you care for your yard and garden. Again, I'm Tom Cobb. I'm an Extension Horticulturist for NDSU and I'm here with Robert Birch from Ad Communications, the man behind the camera who makes all this happen. We are live at North Court of State University Campus and Morrill Hall Studios and we are beaming our broadcast 30 county extension offices across the state. Welcome to you and welcome also to all the other gardeners who are joining us on their home computers. All right, first we're gonna get right to it and I'm going to start talking about raised bed gardens. A hot topic right now and raised bed gardens are popular because they look beautiful and they're easy on your back. You don't have to bend down so far to pull out the weeds and the plants grow well in them too. Here to help you tonight to learn how to build your own raised bed gardens is Steve Sagacer. Steve is the agricultural natural resources agent for Grand Forks County. Steve, welcome to the forums. Well good evening gardeners and so Tom told me not to tell a joke so the first thing I got to do is tell a joke and so I was at gardening Saturday on Saturday and walking down the hallway and one of my gardener friends comes up to me and says Steve I got a question for you and I said what's your question? He said what did the rosemary say to the sage and I said I don't have any idea what did the rosemary say to the sage and he said it's about time. So gardeners it's about time that we learned a little bit about raised bed gardens. So that's what we're gonna talk about. We're gonna talk about building raised bed gardens more than we're gonna actually talk about growing things in raised beds. So we'll go ahead and get started right now and you can see on the slides there that there's a lot that you can do with raised beds. Raised bed gardens are just as diverse as we as people are. They can come in all kinds of shape size forms and all kinds of different flavors and so you can have them multi-levels. You can build them out of landscape timbers. You can build them out of railroad ties although I don't recommend that. You can build them out of concrete blocks. You can raise them totally up off the ground as you can see in the picture in the lower right hand corner there. I did have a picture of some stacked up tires for a raised bed garden but I thought that was less than aesthetically pleasing to the eye so I didn't even include that. But yeah anything that will hold soil can become theoretically a raised bed garden. So it basically just depends on what your imagination wants to conjure up. We use raised bed gardens quite a bit with our junior master gardeners because they're nice, they're concise, they're confined and they do a nice job of helping things stay within bounds. This is a raised bed garden that's made out of concrete patio pavers and it's about 18 inches high in the picture on the left and then it slopes down to the grass line so it's got a slant to it gets natural drainage but it does a really nice job of getting to plants up out of the ground quickly and these are some of our master gardeners and you'll probably recognize our four eighths-youth agent Kerry Knutson in that right hand picture but you can also get raised bed garden kits if you want to. We use them quite a bit for school gardens and we've got a lot of raised bed kits for our school gardens and this is a group of highly motivated extension agents and you give them a couple of drills on a screwdriver and look at them go to work and you get some good team work and well off there's your raised beds all ready for soil. This worked out really fine. Personally I prefer to build mine out of locally available materials rather than purchase the kits but when you're in a hurry and you have to get the job done this is a nice way to go. We use raised bed gardens as I just mentioned for our school gardens and you know what's really nice about that is it helps the children whether it's regular gardening or gardening and raised beds gives them an opportunity to learn the difference between weeds and vegetable plants. It gives them some something to shoot for when they're looking for the vegetables. Throughout the gardening season they can sample some of the fruits and vegetables of their labor and then at the end of the gardening season a lot of times the leftover produce we take that into the cooks in the school lunch program they love it. Granted there's not a lot of vegetables left over that can serve hundreds of students but just the fact that those vegetables were raised on their school grounds in their raised vegetable gardens and that those kids had a hand in it that gives them bragging rice and it's just a nice fun thing to do and it builds that enthusiasm and that incentive to go home and get started with growing their own vegetables. That's what it's all about is eating right and growing your own vegetables. These are two raised bed gardens that I built in my own yard a few years ago and we're going to get into the nitty-gritty on how you can build raised bed gardens simply and is easily as I built these and I didn't necessarily have a set of plans drawn out on paper but I did have a set of plans that I conjured up in my mind and so essentially what you're going to need is a few tools not many I like to protect my knees so I think you should if you have any interest in protecting your knees when you're kneeling on a hard concrete surface like you're going to see in a few minutes get hold of some good knee pads and you'll need a circular saw of some sort or some sort of a cutting tool but a circular saw works really nice tape measure is absolutely essential and if you can beg borrow or steal an electric cordless drill and a cordless driver it'll help you tremendously as far as getting your project done. You've got to have a good hammer and a carpenter square and not one but two pencils because you will break at least one of them in the process. So this is the materials list for one four foot by 10 foot 12 inch high raised bed garden. You're going to need at least well you'll need two two by 12 10 foot long you'll need two two by one two by 12 8 foot long then you'll need two two by four 10 foot long and one two by four 8 foot long. You'll also need some scrap two by four so that you can use those for corner they don't have to be anything fancy but they should be made out of treated type of material like the material that you're building your raised beds out of. You should have some three and a half inch deck screws and you also should have some three inch screws even though that's not listed on this build materials you should have some three inch deck screws as well. Now the material I use for my raised bed gardens is not arsenic treated green lumber it's treated green lumber and it's fully safe for using for raised beds but the arsenic treated lumber has not been sold regionally for a long time so you don't have to worry about using it for that type of a purpose. The first thing that you should do is square the ends of your boards and you will typically get a 10 foot board that's about 120 and one half inches or a little bit more a little bit less long so that gives you some room to cut off the ends to square them up. So take that nice carpenter square of yours and square up that end draw straight line and then move that straight edge or that carpenter square over enough that you can use it as a straight edge when you're actually making that cut but if you if you are like me and you're directionally challenged and you're trying to cut a straight line free hand you might not have done any good trying to square up the end of that board. So that's where again I suggest using that carpenter square as a straight edge so that you can cut that line that you just finished drawing and keep it nice and straight. Do that on every one of your boards on one end and then when you cut them to length you should not have any problem having the other end just a square. So measure off and cut that 10 foot board down to exactly exactly 120 inches and measure and cut your 8 foot 2 by 12s to exactly 48 inches. You have to be perfect with these cuts otherwise your raised bed garden will not be square. Now if that doesn't bother you to not have a square one I guess that's okay but for me I have to have mine square and once you've gotten everything cut then you should start to assemble them and this is where it helps to have a nice smooth flat surface that's big enough to move around on. What I do if it's a nice smooth surface like my driveway slab I just set them up and join them together as best I can and then when I've got the shape that I want I like to clamp things together with a couple of pipe clamps. That acts as that extra pair of hands for you and keeps things standing upright. There's nothing more frustrating when you're working by yourself and have boards falling down that you've just ended up scoring up. Now when you put these pipe clamps on and if you don't have pipe clamps that's not the worst then you don't have to have them but if you can borrow some even if you don't own your own it really does a nice job of helping keeping things together but you do want to just keep them loose enough. Loose enough to keep from falling off and hitting the ground but tight enough so they won't fall and hit the ground but loose enough so that you can move the boards around because you've got a job now where you have to measure dot agnally from one corner to the opposite corner on the other end to square your raised bed. This is really important. Now if you look here in the upper right hand corner and the lower left and the lower right hand corner you'll see that when I've measured diagonally from one corner to the other twice both measurements show 130 inches and seven sixteenths. They're both exactly 137 and 130 inches and seven sixteenths and when I get those measurements to be exactly the same I know that's assuming that I've cut my boards exactly the same way. I know my raised bed is square and that's important because you'll need to have it square down the road when we start leveling it up and putting it in its position. After you've gotten a square then fasten some diagonal temporary braces on the bed and that will serve two purposes. They'll hold it in place while it's being while you're putting your fasteners in the ends but you also need to leave those on for when you pick it up and move it to its location, its permanent location. So put those temporary diagonal braces on. There's no rocket science with how you do that. They just have to be fastened down at an angle and you need to use at least two of them. Now when you prepare to drill, when you prepare to drive your screws in it's really important especially when you're working about three quarters of an inch from the edge of a board to pre-drill those holes. If you don't pre-drill those holes you're going to split the edge of the board and once you split the edge of the board it doesn't have the holding power to keep that raised bed tight. The screws won't have the holding power to keep everything tightened up and intact the way they should be. So pre-drill all of those holes and then go ahead and run your screws in and you should be in pretty good shape. I usually put a I usually put about five screws in per corner. You can use six if you'd like but no less than five. You need to have enough screws to have good holding power. So remember those diagonal braces. They do a beautiful job of keeping everything squared up and intact when you when you and a friend or maybe two friends pick up that raised bed and start to move it. Now these things most often are wet because the material hasn't fully cured and they're heavy. So don't try to move your raised bed by yourself for obvious reasons. First it could hurt you physically but you also could bang it up enough to knock it out of square and then you're really having to start all over again or you probably cause some damage to it. So it needs to be picked up and carried with two or three people. Hopefully a couple of people besides yourself. Then what I suggest doing is taking those scraps little scrap two by fours that we talked about and using those as corner posts and uh now maybe leveling your raised bed isn't important to you but my soil slopes away a little bit in my yard where I have my raised beds and so I like to have the beds leveled and I'll use the corner posts one in each corner and I'll use wood clamps like you see here. I'm going to back up once one time here. If you look at the picture on the left and look closely on the lower right corner the upper left corner and the lower left corner you'll see where I've clamped those posts in place with wood clamps. That's really slick because you can elevate or lower that raised bed as much as you like whatever it takes to get it level and then when you've got it perfect will you like it so it's nice and level tighten those wood clamps and drive in your three inch screws from the outside into those posts that'll hold everything in place it'll keep it square and if you've measured appropriate the appropriate distance from your other raised beds then everything will stay put nicely. Once you've gotten that done then you can go ahead and remove those diagonal braces and that takes us to the next step where you need to cut those corner posts off. I use a reciprocating saw you can use a hand saw just as nicely saw as it probably won't work would be a saver saw or a circular saw you'd probably cause damage to the raised bed for yourself if you tried to do that so if you don't have a reciprocating saw just take a hand saw it works very nicely for cutting those posts off and for leveling things up. What I like to do and this isn't required but I strongly suggest doing this is using a top two by four around the perimeter of the raised bed when you have a length of wood that's 10 feet long there's a possibility that the pressure of the soil on the inside of the raised bed can push the board out and it won't necessarily cause damage but aesthetically it's not very pleasing to the eye. If you put this top cap on I call it then it provides a nice convenient seat when you're out sitting and when you're weeding your raised bed or picking some vegetables and you wanted to sit down for a minute it's a lot easier to sit on a three and a half inch wide board than it is a one and a half inch upright board so it gives you a little bit of a seat but more importantly it strengthens that length of board and keeps it from wanting to blow out and it's worked nicely for me for several years on my existing raised beds I haven't had any bowing problem at all so what I suggest doing those have to be cut to exactly 120 inches as well and then drive two screws as you see in that lower right hand corner through the existing sling of a two light hand and then drive another one through the corner post and through the end piece and by doing that you're helping to tighten up the corner even more and making it stronger so there it is with all four of the caps in place it's a finished raised bed and now it's waiting for soil and we'll talk about soil a little bit next and what we can be putting in there I want to first mention though a location is really important try your best to get your raised beds in a minimum of eight hours of good full sunlight per day I think that's really important if you don't have good sunlight you're just not going to have good adequate growth of your plants and everything will have been wasted all of your time and hard labor and everything will have been wasted you won't be satisfied with the results of your work so full sun is really important obviously you can have probably sun from morning till till dusk but do your best to get at least eight to ten twelve eight to ten hours of sunlight ideally 12 hours of sunlight a day and then try to get someplace where it's close to water because yes you will have to water your raised beds they'll take water just like a conventional garden but in many cases they'll take even more water we'll need more water so someplace where you can reach it easily with the garden hose will be very important and then if you have the option try to locate it close to your kitchen consider a mini kitchen garden it's a whole lot easier to run off 15 or 20 feet from your kitchen door and snip off some spinach leaves or whip up a quick salad or grab a handful of string beans in the evening when it's just a few steps away then it is to have to walk 150 feet out or to a backyard somewhere and find it so the closer you can make it to the kitchen the more you'll find that you enjoy it the more enjoyable it'll be it'll be to run out and grab something and just the more convenient it will be all the way wrong so location really is important so let's talk a little bit about soil soil can come in a lot of different types of a lot of varieties as well but ideally it needs to be loose and needs to be well drained and it needs to have some available nutrients in it the best soils are a balance between clay sand and some organic matter and they all have their purposes the sand will provide some drainage if your soil is a little bit dense our soil here in the red river valley is really dense in many cases if you're going to attempt to use that soil by itself in your raised bed you're going to be in for a big disappointment you wouldn't use just pure garden soil dug out of your garden in a raised bed any more than you would put it into a container to expect to have good results you do need to add some amendments to your soil to make it what you like it to be sand of course I already mentioned but some peat moss like you see in the upper right hand corner some compost are well decomposed and the mirror will work really well you don't have to use all of these but they all will give you improvements in your soil a sandy loam soil in the lower left hand corner that's the soil that I'm holding and I just dug scoop that out of my raised bed one of my existing raised beds a few days ago and took that picture it's just fun to play with it it's just nice light fluffy soil it's got a great smell as well you might want to add some vermiculite or some perlite probably not important but whether sawdust works really well let me just give you a little caveat than that don't go on to a local saw mill or lumber yard and pick up a bunch of sawdust and bring it home and think you're going to have good success by putting that in your raised bed pick it up yes if it's free even better bring it home but put it in a pile where you can let that sit for a year it needs a minimum of a year in the sun and rain falling down to wash all the impurities out of it and to wash the salts out and if it's looking pretty good after a year maybe you should set it let it sit for two years it needs to be looking almost like soil before you mix it up into your raised bed but then it'll be a really nice additive and add some of that organic matter that your soil is going to really enjoy now as I mentioned drainage is important but you can I suggest using local sources you know mix your own mix your own soil and use those local sources but if you just aren't into that alternatively you can use purchased high quality bag to pre-mixed bulk soil but what that's going to do is it's going to skyrocket the price of your raised bed it's going to take a lot longer for you to really enjoy the payback from that raised bed if you put a lot of money into ready mixed potting soil but remember it's also important to remember that the crop that you have growing in that raised bed is going to use soil nutrients each year what you put in this here is not going to be the same soil that you're going to have at the end of the season so you do need to add nutrients annually if you're going to get that productivity where you want it to be I'm not suggesting that you take a soil test every year but I am suggesting to keep in mind that your plants are using nutrients so you have to add some nutrients back in it's important whether you're conventionally gardening in a regular ground type of garden or in raised beds that are probably even more important in raised beds so I'm just about ready to wrap it up here Tom I just want to say this is kind of a closing that raised bed gardening it's a lot of work to get started I won't lie to you you have to build these beds you have to fill them with soil you got to make sure you got everything balanced right you got to level them all up so it's a lot of work to get started but then that's where it gets fun once it's established it's easy gardening thereafter you don't have that many inputs of labor and other materials to make it fun and so let's just get started let's start doing some raised bed gardening okay thank you Steven let's uh we encourage your questions now Steve we're going to get right to them uh what kind of clamps did you use were those pipe clamps those were pipe clamps Tom and the pipe was it was three quarter inch pipe and the clamps were called pony clamps you can pick them up at your local building supply store or hardware store you will have to have the ends of the pipe threaded and your local hardware store can cut the pipe to any length you want it to and they can also thread it for you it has to be threaded at the same diameter of course as the pipes as the clamps are so you can buy either half inch clamps or three quarter inch diameter clamps that I use the three quarter inch ones and they're slick to use but you can use they don't have to be pony clamps they can be any brand of clamp but they just give you that extra set of hands and help keep things more intact good how about is there concern with cinder blocks containing fly ash and leaching toxic compounds have you heard that before I've heard that just as individuals say they have problems with planting annuals and pernials next to the newly poured concrete foundation and there may be some truth to that I personally haven't experienced that but I don't have any new cinder blocks to work with the cinder blocks that I do use for some of my smaller raised beds which aren't very many are well weathered some of them are quite a few years old so if there wasn't any leaching that was going on it was probably it's probably long since leached out but that's certainly something to be concerned about and maybe something we need to look into a little further okay um you could always talk to the manufacturer get some information from them exactly maybe good source of the information how about composite decking material can we use that to construct the raised bed are you worried again about chemicals harmful chemicals leaching into the soil I haven't used composite decking material before but I do believe that the material that we purchased the raised bed kits for our school gardens was made out of similar not the same material and uh there they were designed for raised beds there shouldn't have been or there aren't any problems that we use or discovered so far with that but again that might be something to check with the manufacturer about my larger concern would be that the composite deckboards are not very thick and consequently I think unless you reinforce them quite stoutly you're going to have some bowing taking place that would be a bigger concern of mine but regarding whether there would be leaching taking place of some toxic materials something that would be another question you could follow up with manufacturer Steve have you ever used PVC pieces that you add to the corners and make a little hoop house and need to cover with polyester maybe to protect from frost I have not I have not done that but I know that there are a lot of individuals that have made many hoop houses or many tunnels that work really nicely for that I haven't fallen a reason to have to worry about that but uh it's certainly a way to begin your garden earlier in the spring and to keep it growing longer in the fall so it's not difficult to try that and you can find multiple videos of uh many hoop houses like that on any one of the youtube channels how about uh do you put fabric at the bottom before you put the soil in the box I do not I like to have I like to can I like to visualize my raised bed as just being an extension of the existing soil so if the roots of my carrots want to decide to grow really long or or if the root systems need to get down there as deep as they want to get for whatever plants I'm growing they've got that option to do that whereas if there are our landscape fabric types of barriers in the bottom then I think that that could potentially cause some problems and the other reason that I don't do this because I'm I'm working with a raised bed that's 12 inches high so I'm not concerned about quackgrass or any other bad type of weed having enough tenacity to come up through that that much soil and I haven't had that problem developed yet and I'll be honest with you my lawn is not free of quackgrass there's quackgrass growing right around my raised beds that you saw in the photos there and I have not had any quackgrass sprung enough to push this way up through that do you have a minimal height for your bed you have 12 inches can get away with eight inches six inches you ever tried a lower height I have never tried lower heights other than our school gardens those are eight inch high raised beds and we do not have landscape fabric or anything in the bottom of those we have not had problems with weed infiltration either but the more shallow the raised bed becomes the less of an advantage you have by having a raised bed and at some point there's really the lower you go let's say you made it out of a two by four yeah it'll be a raised bed but let's face it folks the whole idea behind the raised bed is to get it up out of the ground for multiple reasons one for convenience of not having to get down so low you have better control of what's taking place because you don't have weed infiltration if it's 12 inches high the local cottontails can't even jump into it which i've discovered is quite nice so there's a lot of advantages to be a little bit higher but if you can afford two by 12s two by 10s or two by eights will work just fine but as you get smaller you lose some of those advantages so steve are you telling me that the cottontail rabbits and grain forks can only have 12 inches they can't make it 12 inches what if they're fat and lazy they need a snow bank to stand on you need a three-foot fence to control cottontails except for grain forks well you you must identify your cottontails you're talking about jack-radar that's not a sport feed with a jack-radar you got unhealthy cottontails here um also i like to i never use landscape fabric underneath there i see no reason for it and also i scraped i scraped natus weld because i don't want to have a layering any type of layering in that in case can you bring up a good point when you say that tom if you want the ultimate advantage before you put your soil in and i do this as well fill up that soil loosen it up that existing so that you're going to put your new soil on top of it so you don't have those layers of a division developing there so that you don't have any barriers keeping your root system going down if they want to well have you heard anything about what a direction they should face north south east should they go north to south or east to west it's only important when you're going east to west if you're going to be growing tall plants and if you remember and those some of those original earlier photos i showed you can see some tall poles coming out of a couple of my raised beds well i had tomatoes on those and i'll tell you right now if you try to put tomatoes on the south and carrots on the north you won't have anything growing except for your tomatoes so it's ideally if you're going to go east and west you have to keep that in mind but the tall things on the north and mine are east and west now i grow a lot of grapes and my grapes all go north and south so i get equal amounts of sunlight in the morning and afternoon and so if you have the option i would say go north and south but if you don't i chose to go east and west and they do just nicely fine just make sure it's sunny how about any other wisdom you can share about using cement blocks well like i said i don't use them very much the few times i have used them they're old and i'm not concerned about anything leaching out of them other than the fact that you might want to find out what they're made out of i don't think i can really offer too much more insight on what may or may not be a problem with them how long do you expect your beds to last the lumber is guaranteed to last 20 years and if they last that long i probably won't be too worried about it after that anyway that's right or i'll be building new ones we'll be talking about we'll share a garden i'll want them a little higher if i have to reach it from a chair that's right uh what kind of wood do you suggest if you want to build your raised bed all the way to waist high i would use the same materials but that does not mean you have to add waist heights of soil you can put a false bottom in them if you want to you want to make certain that you include some drainage in that false bottom but i still would try to have a minimum of 12 inches of soil okay uh you know when you put the boards together do you use any glue no i see no advantage to using glue although if you're a wood maker a woodworker and you do want to use glue make sure you're using some sort of a waterproof spar type of glue an outdoor boat making type of glue because it'll definitely get wet indoor elmer's glue types of glues will not last but if you fasten them good with three and a half inch minimum screws on the corners but better you can even go with foreign screws just make sure they're deck treated screws are treated with the material if they won't deteriorate that's the important thing and at least three and a half inches long i don't see a reason for using glue about have you ever used pallets are they safe to use for gardening pallets generally are not made out of treated lumber to the extent that yes they would be as far as unless unless the toxic chemical have been spilled on them perhaps they've been used to hold barrels of waste oil or something there might be an instance there where they wouldn't be good to use for raised beds the only concern about using pallet wood is that yes it's probably free but it's not going to last very well long because since it's not been treated with the preservative it's going to deteriorate and within four or five years or probably rebuilding the cap it's free and free then and it won't deteriorate and and you don't have that option to go long you'd probably be restricted to the length whatever the pallets are you'll put a lot more lumber a lot of a lot more time into it if you're going to use those types of materials but i'm not against that now let's make a lot of nice projects okay how about have you tried putting a panel over the edges of two raised beds for vines put a panel over the edges of two raised beds maybe two raised beds i can't put a panel over them to allow for vines to climb over them i can say that i haven't uh with my vining types of plants whether they're cucumbers or tomatoes i have not done this with cantaloupes but my cucumbers and tomatoes i tie them to poles and grow them up that way and can't conjure up in my mind an image of using a panel across the top you know i'm not saying it wouldn't work but i just can't figure out how i would go about it just anything that provides support to the vine will get the job done how about uh they asked about sawdust again if adding sawdust to a regular garden should it be aged at least a year you talked about that it should be aged a minimum of a year if you look at it and you pull the pile apart and it still looks like fresh sawdust inside there after a year let it sit for another year and uh after a couple of years it should be starting to turn kind of black starting to look a little bit like compost throwing a little bit of dirt and give it to start deteriorating treated it a little bit like compost and after two years it should be ready but the higher the pile of sawdust is the longer it's going to take for it to cure for a lack of a better term and it's going to have the temporary nitrogen deficiency right you have to worry about uh or our panel question clarified that you would you take a two raised beds and then you would bend and curve the panel to unite the two individual raised beds like put a bridge over them that'll get the job done it would definitely get the job done yes how about uh what type of fertilizer would you suggest for raised beds that are three years old i like to use slow release fertilizers my favorite brand is osmo coat and i don't know the specific analysis but i'm thinking something like a 10 10 10 works really nicely and i'm kind of lazy when it comes to fertilizing so i'll also pretty good at the osmo coat in the spring and more or less forget about it but i've also added some organic matter from the compost um usually uh i usually just work with my own compost that i've made but that and some uh slow release fertilizer seems to get me through the years through the entire growing season just fine how about do you know where someone can get plans for a portable lightweight raised bed that's accessible to someone in a wheelchair so they can pull it up like a table i'm sure there's lots of them online wheelchair gardening designs there are there are at our most recent gardening saturday program on saturday we had a presenter address that very topic about working with individuals with disabilities and uh those individuals that want to continue to garden everything from adaptive tools to share height gardens and so i'd be happy to share some of that information from her presentation with you if you'd like just contact me um how about uh do you ever use drainage rock in the bottom of the garden kind of rock is something i'm using a retaining wall no i don't but if you remember the photo that showed the finished raised bed there was a gap an air gap or a space on one end where the soil could spill out where it was sitting flat on the ground on the other end i do put some larger stones in the bottom just to hold the soil in around that perimeter but it's not for drainage just to help hold the soil that's a good idea about uh how about wheat holes as a soil additive organic i can't see why they would be detrimental i can think it could only help as long as again they didn't uh draw the nitrogen away in the process of decomposing and make it unavailable for plants themselves i think if i was Dave Frans and i would say i think sphagnum peat moss can't go wrong with that right all these other exotic things are you know you can work with the available materials and uh don't go out of your way to buy exotic materials from foreign lands uh because it might give you a minute advantage your best that is working what's easily available and who knows this may not be your first raised bed you may be like me i'm actually have i have materials what you saw was the first of two that i'm building and i'm planning to build a third one on top of that so i'll have a total of five raised beds in that particular location so don't make it more difficult than it needs to be it's not rocket science but you do need to do it correctly also uh do you rotate your crops yes i absolutely do how do you do that i make sure i'm not planting tomatoes potatoes or peppers in the same location from one year to the next and that's one of the reasons that you'll see probably by the end of this spring i'll have five raised beds there just to give me more options for rotation as well because rotating once every three years or four years is going to be a lot better than just back and forth okay um you know how about is there a special width of the raised bed set like why don't you go wider that's an excellent question tom i don't know if you thought it up yourself or somebody actually asked that but the reason we don't go any wider than four feet is because it's really hard to reach beyond two feet when you're sitting there picking weeds maybe we're kind of lazy maybe we just don't have that long of a reach but four feet wide seems to be about the proven best width for most raised beds i suppose you could go a little bit wider maybe six inches but if you're starting to reach in beyond two feet you're going to find it's uncomfortable and it just won't be as enjoyable to you so if you keep it a minimum i mean if you keep it no wider than four feet and i should have mentioned that when i was showing you my diagrams that end pieces need to be inside of the side pieces so that you keep that true four feet width there okay and just want to emphasize a couple points one is that you use pressure-treated zumber you don't have to buy that very expensive cedar lumber right you think that's excessive pressure right last 20 years guaranteed and also steve i think it's worth noticing that you had the same soil mix that dav franzin recommended for containers and that about one third of organic matter like peat moss one third of sand and then one third of top soil something like that so you guys are on the same wavelength as far as echoes you don't have to use like mel's special mix or anything really too pricey are there any other special questions out there before we move on last chance for questions are any famous last words steve happy garden happy spring get out there and grow the vegetables okay steve thanks we appreciate it excellent job yeah folks okay and we're gonna take a five minute break right now and then we're gonna talk about some shady garden practices