- I'm kneeling beside a bed
that we made eight months ago,
last August. It's now April.
In this video, I'll show you
how to make such a bed with
with a minimum of fuss
and without disturbing the soil at all,
just placing compost on top of weeds.
And some of the weeds are still trying
to grow, like there's one particularly
stubborn one here which is
Bindweed, still pushing through the
compost a bit
but it's massively weakened
and there are not actually many other weeds,
and very few weeds have grown
since this bed was made,
and we've cropped it you'll
see that in the video
and now it's already had its second
plant in which we've planted potatoes
actually just ate potato seeds
to fill the whole bed.
So have fun watching how this bed
was made and how you can
can replicate the same in your garden.
here are two lengths of timber,
both eight feet long and each one,
i cut in half to give myself four lengths,
four foot long, in metric that's 2.4
becoming 1.2 meters.
The thickness of the wood
is two inches or five centimeters,
so that's pretty sturdy.
You could get away with one inch.
Two inch will give a longer life
and a sturdier frame
and the width of the timbers is
six inches or 15 centimeters,
and that gives you the height of the bed basically
so again you could have more
for a deeper bed
or you pick up slightly less,
for a shallower bed.
And I'm simply sawing them,
in the way i learned at school,
nothing fancy to have four pieces.
I'm using a drill bit slightly thinner
than the width of the screw
and drilling one inch in from the ends,
and a bit more than an inch
from the top and bottom.
And I'm drilling holes only at one end
of each of the four pieces,
because they are going to overlap
when I screw them together.
So there's screws going in four
of the eight possible ends altogether.
(drilling sound)
Before putting the boards in place,
it's good to check
that you've got a nice square shape.
Oblong beds are awkward for sewing
and planting so I've measured
the corners put them in,
and then i measure the diagonals
and that tells me if the diagonals measure the same,
that tells me the bed is square.
In this case it wasn't, just working out
where i need to move them, jiggle the
corners bit, re-measure
and now it's square.
So, I'm placing the wood on the ground,
it's not anchored in any way, except
by each piece of wood holding
to the other one.
There is nothing anchoring these timbers
to the ground itself.
The screws in each corner, two screws in
each corner, so eight screws altogether
is all there is there.
The screws are 80 millimeters long,
three and a quarter inches
so they go well through the two inches
and into the other bit of wood,
and their counter sunk as well by the drill.
And that's all it is actually,
it's a very quick and simple bed
to assemble the frame.
Ground is rarely perfectly level
and you can see I'm jiggling a bit with
the levels as i screw in each corner.
If you're worried about your levels at all,
you can use some soil to fill up holes
and just get a bit more level,
before you begin.
Then, when it comes to filling this bed,
I'm not going to put any cardboard down
on the grass, although you could if you wanted.
Now, it's the joyful moment
of filling the bed with compost.
The first batch is the least decomposed,
this is, it's not as decomposed as it looks actually,
this is green waste compost which got very hot
and it's still slightly warm,
I'm putting in there but mostly rotten.
But you can see the bits of wood,
there's quite a bit of wood in there
so I'm putting the lower nutrient,
slightly less broken down material
at the bottom of the heap,
and then just raking it level
and tamping it down a bit
before the next layer goes on.
so the next layer, I'm putting on
some of my own homemade compost
which is higher in nutrients.
it's about, eight ten months old this batch
and nicely decomposed.
And that will grow good plants
but you know it could have stopped here actually,
but what I'm going to do though,
is really fill up this bed big time
good for two years filling.
So you know you've got options there,
you could stop at this point
but if you do, your bed compost always sinks
so say, after six eight months you'd
be going down a bit below the wood.
So here I'm actually now going above the wood,
with a final layer of mushroom compost
which is 16 months old.
Really quite well rotted
and ideal for planting and sowing into
straight away. There's no need to wait,
so the final process is just
leveling off, also treading down.
This was mid-summer, quite a dry year
the compost is not wet, it's damp and moist
but it's not wet
and so this treading down, make sure
you've got a nice firm surface
for seeds and plants to develop in.
Season plants like firm surfaces,
they don't like it all too soft and fluffy
so it is important if you're filling a bed
with compost like this, to really make
sure it's firm.
This bed is now ready to sow and plant,
but it's August, 2016.
The fact that it always means I've
got need crops that mature very quickly,
in the remaining growing time in Autumn
so, in the middle I'm going to have a row
of Kohlrabi, that's the big plants
you can see in the blue tray
and I sowed them five weeks earlier,
so they're quite mature already
and then in the other half the far half,
I'm putting in some salads,
which I've sown in modules only two weeks before,
so they're still quite young, small plants
and they'll give salad leaves through the Autumn.
The Kohlrabi is going to swell up
and make big roots.
It's a variety that's designed
to keep growing in the Autumn.
It's called Cossack, there's another one
called Super Smelts which is very good
for that they don't go woody
like they do in the spring,
so you can just leave them to get
growing, keep growing and get really big.
And the salads I'm putting in much closer
than the Kohlrabi because they're
never going to get very big,
we'll just keep picking the outer leaves
that's things like Rocket, Mizuna, Mibuna,
Pak choi, Tatsoi, Red Kale,
that's a good old mixture
of flavors and colors.
The holes that i dipped,
mean that i have a very quick
and easy planting i just pop
the plants out of the module tray,
and into these holes whereas
the Kohlrabi, I'm using my hands
because it's the compost, although it's firm,
it's still beautifully soft
so, you can even do that with your fingers.
Make a deep hole.
All the plants I'm putting in here
are going in quite deep
and that's a very good method
for all plantings that you do.
If you've got a long stem particularly,
put them in so that most of the stem
is burying that makes the plant more sturdy.
The half nearest truss I'm drawing
drills initially with the dipper,
and then finishing them off with my hands
just the fingers, that's
to get the right depth for sowing carrots and radish.
So, the radish are going to give a small
early crop and they kind of mark the row
as well while the carrots are coming up
so, the rally seeded going in maybe
one inch apart, two centimeters
and not a lot, and they were very nice.
They were ready to eat within five weeks
from this sowing, whereas the carrots,
now I'm a little bit late for carrots,
this is, 10th 12th of August,
and that gives time actually for only
baby carrots, for the winter
but it's fun thing to do
and I'm doing it partly also to show
how you can sow carrot seeds
into compost like this
of a brand new bed.
And finally just to finish that sowing,
I'm just pulling the compost over
with my hands,
and then I actually walk on the drills
because it's very good for the seeds
to be firmly pushed into contact
with the compost,
and even though this is carrots,
you know compost you can't really
compact it so you're firming it
without making it too hard.
Last of all is watering.
If it was spring, i might not have needed
to do this stage but it's mid-summer
and quite a lot of fine weather around
so i wasn't expecting rain for a few days.
I give, now gave the bed a really good soaking
all over including
where I'd sown the carrots and radish.
I just want to make sure that it's really
wet at the beginning, then I'm going to leave it.
I didn't do any subsequent watering here
for five days after this.
So my wish is that this video shows you
how and inspires you to make a better tool
like this. They're not difficult,
you just need the materials
and have great fun in growing wonderful food
all through the year.