How to Start New Raised Garden Beds
Video transcription
Hello, I'm Steve Skinner with Kathryn's Garden. Today, we're going to talk about how to start new raised garden beds. Now that we have our garden bed in place, we need to fill it with good garden soil. You can go to any one of your local garden centers and purchase some great mixes that are available there. But be sure that you talk to an expert and tell him what kind of vegetables you're planning on planting and also you can talk to your local extension agent about your garden soil for your particular area. If you're going to do your own mix, it's best to already have your mix built before you start your raised garden bed. That way, all you have to do is mulch and then you can fill in your bed. The first thing that we need to do before we fill our bed with garden soil is to mulch it and a great mulch, and it's free, is newspaper. And we just simply wet our newspaper and we lay it down in the garden bed about a half inch thick. So, you just lay it down and make bigger is better and this newspaper will encourage worms, it will add to the soil, it will cause more humus in the soil, it'll compost, it's a great way to mulch and it also, best of all, will not allow weeds to come back through. OK the next thing we need to do is put the soil in. The way I built this soil is I used topsoil and then I mixed in leaf mulch, grass clippings, a little bit of chicken manure, and then some compost and thoroughly mixed it with my pitchfork and then I just put it in the bed. I'm Steve Skinner with Kathryn's Garden, and that's how you fill a raised garden bed.