the easiest raised bed you will ever assemble with almost no tools needed and
cheap natural materials to build this raised bed is one of your best options
when starting a raised bed garden so let's look at what you will need to
build this raised bed you will need some corner blocks these are made from
concrete these are concrete corner blocks that you can find in the paver
section of Home Depot the one we are using is a tan-colored block and this
will be the sides of your raised bed for the raised bed material along the sides
you will need some kind of wood and I recommend that you use natural word
natural wood is always much better than pressure-treated word the corner blocks
are six inches high and although you can get away with 2x6 inch wood which
is enough I highly recommend that you go with the 2x8s which are eight
inches high and the extra two inches really helps because it helps you secure
the raised bed much better into the ground when you are assembling it now at
your local Home Depot if you buy the word you can cut it to size and you can
pretty much use any length you want as long as you have the corner posts you
can choose word of any length and have it cut to the size you need and now
let's look at assembling the raised bed so the first step is to lay out the word
in the area that you will be assembling your raised bed just to get an idea of
the space and this is how the wood blocks go into the corner posts as you
can see here the wooden planks just fit right into the corner post and the
corner post is designed in such a way that it will easily hold the 2x4s
or 2x6s or the 2x8s very easily
now before you put in the wood blocks you need to make sure that there are no
underground roots in that area you may want to clear the area a little bit just
create a sort of a row just in that place that you're going to be putting
the wooden sides the wood that we are using is Douglas fir wood and this is a
great quality wood that you can use to assemble your raised beds in places like
Southern California the Douglas fir wood is one of the best options you have it's
a natural world as well and it stands up to the elements quite well
now while you are assembling these sides of the bed you can use a hammer to just
hammer the sides in and you might have to do some adjustments as you can see
here to make sure that the wood is going inside the corner post as you see
and just use a light hammer don't be too harsh on the word it might crack or
split
and all you truly want to do is make sure that the wood is fitting well into
it the corner post and user travel to clear the soil below the wood plank and
this is why you need the eight-inch so you need 2x8s and not 2x6s
the reason for having the 2x8s is that you have about two inches
below the ground where the raised bed can be secured and that will give your
raised bed a much better foundation now you can just level the soil around
the raised bed once the corner posts are in and the wooden planks have been
pushed inside the corner posts and you can do the same thing on the outside
part of the raised bed as well just to make sure that the raised bed is quite
intact and although the 8 inch width of the wooden planks will give excellent
support to your raised bed you can go one step further and if you look at the
corner blocks you will see that they have a hole there to put some rebar and
the rebars will help you enforce the raised bed even better compared to not
having the rebar zone
and to put in the rebars all you do is just take three foot rebars and
then just push it into the corner post just like that like you see here
and just hammer it in and this will really secure your raised bed very well
into the ground now this is completely optional the raised bed will still be
quite intact even without the rebars but adding the rebars gives you extra
strength extra reinforcement for the raised beds and if the rebar doesn't go
in all the way there's a little trick you can use you can just use another
rebar over it and then just drive the rebar in with the hammer so that it goes
all the way inside so as you can see here just use another rebar and then
hammer in the rebar that you just pushed in and this will really secure the
raised bed very well
and you can see that we have also trimmed the corner block a little bit
we've just chiseled it out this is not needed if you have the space we were
just running out of space and we had to accommodate the corner post in this way
and now let's look at what we are going to be adding for the raised bed mix
they're going to be using peat moss this is Sphagnum peat moss that's
compressed and it's available in large bags we're also going to be using some
chicken manure which will act as a fertilizer organic fertilizer and we're
going to be using some organic garden tone fertilizer to add more nutrients
into the soil and we're going to be using vermiculite now
vermiculite will not only retain moisture it will also improve drainage in the mix
now the first step is to take the peat moss and lay it on the floor of the bed
and what we need to do is break up this peat moss into small particles so that
it will spread evenly and will mix very well with the raised bed mix now usually
the back peat moss is quite hard and it will have blocks of peat moss as you can
see here and all you need to do is just take them up well just spread it out
over the raised bed and this will help set the base for the other materials to
be added now the proportion is usually one part
peat moss if you're using compost you can use one part compost since we didn't
have a lot of bagged compost we used manure and we're gonna be adding some
vermiculite now you can use the same amount of vermiculite as you use the
peat moss that is one is to one or you can go easy on the vermiculite if you
want to save cost you can use less vermiculite and use more many or more
compost and more peat moss however the general recommendation is equal parts of
peat moss vermiculite and compost and since we didn't have a lot of bagged
compost we used chicken manure as you will soon see in the next step
once you add the vermiculite just mix it in very well with the peat moss and this
really forms the base of the raised bed mix and as you can see here the quantity
of vermiculite looks a lot more we are adding our manure here this is the back
manure and you can also get blended manure and compost mix these days at
Home Depot they have a blended steer manure and compost mix that you can use
what we're using your is chicken manure which is slightly higher in nitrogen and
will give a nice start to these plants once we plant them
now mix it in very well and as you can see here the quantity of vermiculite
looks slightly larger just by looking at it we're gonna be adding some organic
fertilizer to four more nutrients in the soil and what you can do is just eyeball
a handful of this fertilizer and add it onto the raised bed now there's no
specific rule for adding this fertilizer just eyeball it and add a handful at
each spot in the raised bed as you can see here and this fertilizer does take
time to break down usually a few months so just make sure you adding this during
setting up the raised beds so that they're available once the plants start
growing and since we had a lot of vermiculite
that we could see we added some more peat moss as you can see here and the
idea is to have a good mix of peat moss vermiculite and compost and depending on
your budget depending on how much you want to really spend on the potting mix
you can make very cheap potting mixes or make very expensive potting mixes it
just depends on how much you want to spend on the potting mix you could even
use some topsoil and add in some perlite and some manure and you could get a very
cheap raised bed mix and the final step is to add some water
to the raised bed mix that we just added adding water is very important because
it helps remove the air pockets from the material
and once that's done you can go ahead and plant your plants or sow your seeds
in the raised bed and this is how the raised bed looks like once it's all done
as you can see here it looks beautiful and is actually very cheap to assemble
so there we have it folks that was our episode on assembling a very cheap
raised bed very easily and using almost no tools other than your common garden
tools so I hope you liked this video and if you have used this technique to build
your raised bed do let us know in the comments box below if you are using an
alternate design for your raised bed do let us know about that in the comment
section as well we'll see you again soon happy gardening