What is Raised Bed Gardening?

Video Transcript

"I'm Doug Smiddy of Smiddy's Gardening Services here on behalf of expertvillage.com and welcome to my garden. Today we're here to talk about low maintenance gardening. Okay, so let's talk about raised bed gardens. Like I said before my soil here it's not so hot so I had to improvise 12 inch lumber, you want to over do it on your depth a little as oppose to under doing it. You want to give enough room for all your roots to grow out especially if you're going to grow out root prop like carrots or beets or something like that. So that's why I used a 12 inch board on here. Again, think of your size of your garden and keep it small and manageable. Now you may ask what do I put in there? Well you want to put in some good soil. A lot of people go out and they'll have someone truck in some topsoil. Be very careful when you do that and do your research because not all topsoils is good topsoil. There can be what people call topsoil, it's really mostly sand or on the other end of the spectrum you can get a lot of clay. So do a little research, ask people you know, people that make no landscapers where they get their soil, who they can recommend. I had a good recommendation and was very pleased with this soil, it's not too sandy, it's not too clay. You can see it sticks together but breaks up very easily and what that means is it's not going to get really compacted when it rains and it's going to be nice and loose and crumbly for your roots to grow in. So again take your time and do your research on the soil. It's better to get sandy soil than clay soil. You can amend sandy soil with things like beet moss and compose and compose cow manure. Clay soil, once that gets hard and wet, it's pretty much like cement you really can't do much with it. So again do your research and get some good topsoil for your garden."