I’M gonna show you how to build a garden bed using really simple supplies that you can get at any home improvement store. I’M gonna tell you some of the difficulties and challenges that I experienced in the first year.
So last year my fiancee and I carry rad moved into this house. It had a big backyard which we were very excited about because both of us love, gardening, Carrie, has always been really big on indoor plants and when I grew up, I always was in the backyard helping my parents out with their vegetable garden.
We are on a stay-at-home, shelter-at-home order because of the coronavirus, but we did manage to get over to the home depot and shop safely. We got some more supplies, some more soil. Yesterday we got the shovel out and we dug up.
The grass got some more soil, we’ve got soil, that’s used for in-ground planting, we have a bunch of little plants, we have zucchini squash, cucumber some peppers and a bunch more Tomatoes, not to mention the stuff, that’s already in the garden.
I always envisioned and imagined having a big garden where I can grow my own food to feed my family and it’s really cool that we’ve been doing this together for about a year and it’s something really nice that we can do together.
What I’ve Learned From Gardening
So, let’s get into this garden before I show you how to build your garden. I figured I’d, take a minute here and share some of the things that growing my own food and tending a garden have taught me. Apart from increasing your self-sufficiency and saving on your grocery bills, gardening can impart some very powerful life lessons if you can dig it.
Firstly, gardening gives you a very tactile understanding of the passage of time and of seasonality. Indeed, the word season comes from the old French word says: song, which means sowing or planting the spring comes from the springtime when plants would spring forth from the ground.
Our relationship to agriculture and growing plants permeates our relationship to time, including daylight savings which were created to help farmers in time of planting and harvesting. It’s not just an annoying trick that makes you late to work a couple of times a year.
Secondly, gardening teaches you compassion and responsibility. You have to show up for your plants because if you neglect them, they won’t reach their full potential, or worse they’ll die. You have to take responsibility for your plant family and do what you can to nurture and protect them.
Third, you’ll spend more time outdoors and more time exercising both of these things will help reduce anxiety and make you a healthier happier, person you’ll experience what the Japanese call shooting, yoku or forest bathing essentially being surrounded by nature.
It just makes you feel better. All that happiness will help you learn to abandon perfectionism and realize that you can’t change what you don’t control. This lesson can be tough for many of us, but it’s worthwhile.
Sometimes you do everything right, giving a plant all the attention and nutrients it needs, but for some reason, it just doesn’t grow. You can’t control the fate of every plant in your garden. All you can do is try your best and trying lead to the next lesson.
Acceptance of what you can’t change, which leads to the final lesson, appreciation and appreciation for the time and energy you’ve put into the ground to grow, sustenance and fuel for you and your loved ones; gratitude for the beautiful miracle of life on our planet.
The simple beauty of sowing growing and harvesting a living breathing creation, which returns your effort with fuel for your life. It really is a beautiful symbiotic relationship and an eternal cycle, one as timeless as life itself, and one that will profoundly change your relationship with the earth.
How To Get On With Your Gardening
Let’s start gardening. Yesterday, this looked like that. We took a shovel and dug underneath the grassroots and lifted all the grass out to fill another garden bed. Originally, we had used 8 pieces of wood per garden bed.
You can see that they’re doubled up right there, but we realized it’s not really necessary. You can get by with just one piece of wood, so we took the extra cement little base plates there and we took extra wood and are building out extra garden plots.
So this is definitely the most labor-intensive part of the whole garden setup is the build. So if you’re deciding to go in the ground, it’s gonna require you to clear the ground out. You can do that in a bunch of different ways.
The fastest way is definitely just digging out the grass. That’s what we’re gonna do today. We did that on a section just over there yesterday and today we’re expanding to more garden beds to do the same and then we’ll plant, the small vegetable plants that we bought today, and hopefully, in two months, they’ll be food. When you’re digging up the grass – but you really want to be careful not doing – is taking too much of the topsoil, it’s kind of like a delicate little dance where you want to get underneath the roots of the grass.
But you want to leave as much of the soil as you can, so I recommend kind of coming in first straight down and deep, and then when you can get underneath the roots, that’s where you can just slide the shovel in and then you just want to Kind of like pry it off chances are in the grass below it like in the soil.
There can be insects and they can be kind like either in the larva stage in the Ag stage or already developed into their adult form. Any way you go about it. If you find those in the ground, you want to take them out and destroy them, you need to remove them from your garden bed or else they’re.
Just gonna sprout the first thing that they will encounter. Are your young vegetable plants which have nice soft leaves which they will eat when we were tilling the soil? Earlier this spring, we encountered a lot of what are called Japanese beetle grubs, all right at home gardeners.
One thing you need to be wary of our pests. This is called a Japanese beetle grub and they’re quite common here in California. We have our fair share, so we’re actively fighting these guys and they like to get in and during the day and take refuge like up in the corners here along the edge of the garden.
So when we get them, we eradicate them, but they will do a lot of damage to your crops. So if you find any of those, you want to remove them. Earthworms are good, leave the earthworms in the soil, they eat the dirt and they help to break it up so that roots and stuff can go in. They’re also good for natural fertilization, so leave earthworms and once you’ve cleared out the grass you’re gonna want To get in there with your hands and pull out any roots, any grass root systems any rocks.
Anything that’s tough! In the earth there you have a compost after you’ve cleared out the grass and broken up the soil. You can add some compost to make the soil more rich adds in good nutrients. We composted our Christmas tree.
We compost the inside cardboard tubes of like a paper towel or a toilet paper roll, even though those are becoming increasingly scarce and we also put in all of our vegetable shards, the pulp from when we juice and we mix it all together, keep it wet stir.
That shows you what plants to put together because, like humans, certain plants have good neighbors and bad neighbors. You want to dig at least six inches down. You know the deeper the better, but it should be as at least as deep as the pot about the plant came in. You don’t want to bury the plant because they’re vulnerable when they’re small, be very gentle when you are placing them into the ground.
And then you want to essentially just softly Pat in the soil around the plant, and you can kind of make like a little conical shape, that’s kind of the best. If you can just kind of tuck it in because it needs support, it needs to be supported.
So that the roots can spread out and that the sprouting plant there can get stronger, [, Music, ] alright, ladies and gentlemen, well, there you have it, that’s how you turn your backyard into a garden.
I hope you found this video enjoyable and helpful. If you did, please give it a thumbs up, share it with your friends and family, so they can start gardening to make sure that you are subscribed to my fiancee Kerry, rad she’s dirty.
She also has a video on her channel about gardening tips as well as many other awesome videos that are super helpful right now when we are all staying at home and self-isolation. So I hope you are all staying as healthy as positive and as happy as you can in these crazy times, but yeah grow your own food.