Now, you might be thinking what earth is
going on here? And the answer is we're
building new earth, what we're doing
we're building a rich and healthy organic
soil over the autumn, winter and early
spring months ready for the next growing
season. We do have black plastic but
under this is where the real magic is
happening. What we do around our
vegetable garden is we put our beds to
sleep in the autumn so we have
well rotted cow manure. Now cow manure is
not only high nitrogen, but it's high in
organic matter because it's mixed with
straw. So you place a layer which is
around 3 inches, so just over seven
centimeters, of this over the top of the
raised bed. Now we don't even bother
digging this in. What we do is we let
the earth worms and other microbes get
to work with composting this down into a
lovely rich soil. And we don't have to
do any of that digging in, and it's always a
no-dig system. Now we do use black
plastic it might not be the best thing
but the reason why we use it, is
because it protects it from the elements
also the black, the colour black is really
good at absorbing heat. So it is a cold
day it is, it's only about 2 degrees
Celsius (35F) but the sun's out and this is
actually absorbing the heat and the
energy, the thermal energy from the Sun
which is warming the ground and the soil
underneath it so that means early in
spring what we're doing is we're
creating and we're warming this bed up
so what's happening is that early on in
spring when all the bare raised beds
are still quite cold,
what's happening here is that this is
going to be a lot warmer for them so
this as a result means we can plant in
this earlier because the black plastic has
helped warm this up.
It also creates a better environment for
earthworms and other microbes which
compost the soil to work in. Now this is
a really easy system to set up all you
need is a source of organic matter
which is high in nitrogen but also has some
nice fibers in so you can
really work on the soil where it can
also retain moisture. You just want to
place a layer like I said before about
three inches so just over seven
centimeters across the surface of the
raised bed, then you can use black plastic
or you might want to use if you don't
want to use black plastic you could use
other dark materials such as leaves
fallen leaves to place a thick layer
over the top and then with black plastic
what you do is either you can weigh it
down or using a spade around their edges,
just poke it in and you'll see now how
that works and that's really effective. So you want
to do this around mid to late autumn
when you've done your last harvest and
then overwinter you won't know what's
going on underneath but when you unveil
it in the spring, you'll see that is
working really really nicely and you'll
be able to see how healthy the soil is
and then you'll soon be able to plant
straight into it. And one final thing I
want to note, is that you don't get the
problem of weeds because if you can see
I'm not sure if you can see hopefully
you can you'll be able to see a few
weeds in this bad, raised bed which
hasn't been covered over and especially
during spring weeds will start to come out of
nowhere if you haven't protected the
surface. But using something like this, such
as black plastic, or a mulch, it means you
don't have to weed your bed before you
plant into it so it's just saving time
you're building soil, you're making it a
lot healthier and you can start earlier.
So I really hope this has either sparked your
imagination or you've got interested in
starting thing, maybe you do something
similar
I'd love to know and if you have any
questions or comments I'd love to see them
and answer them
so thank you once again don't forget to
rate this video and I'll see you again
very soon
goodbye :-)