Filling a Raised Garden Bed. Using Mel’s mix from the square foot gardening method 

Great video. I’m here catching up on videos that I behind on during our move. 👍

This is perfect. I’m a big fan of videos showing the products and methods people use so other folks can try it out step by step. Perfection my friend. This turned out excellent

I put a solid 4x8x16 cap block around my beds. It adds 4 more inches of bed depth and it eliminated the weeds growing up in the hollow spaces. My beds are 12'6" x 47" inside and I have a chicken coop that fits inside the beds. I move it from bed to bed every few months. I ended up pushing my beds together to reduce mowing and weeding. I turned my blocks ideways between the beds for more walking room. I had five beds. By pushing them together I can get seven beds in the room I have available. I grow deer plot forage ahead of the coop and people food behind them. There is some settling over time so I top off the beds with mulch as needed. I am going on ten years with this system and it keeps evolving and getting better. Thanks for the video.

The holes in the cinder blocks are great for small self contained herbs or flowers. Great job guys!

Wow it’s huge! Looks like a lot of hard work but totally worth it, it turned out great! Amazing job 👏

That bed looks amazing, and a few worms too!

Mel's Mix works, but it does have some issues. First, it's probably the most expensive growing mix you can create. For a small 4 x 4 raised bed filled to a 10 inch height, it takes about 100 gallons of mix, which if you use 5 gallon buckets, will require 20 buckets for each bed. A huge bed the size of the one you built would require probably about 800 gallons of mix. That's a huge amount of material. If everything is purchased retail, that can really get expensive very fast. I don't know the costs in your areas but filling a bed the size of yours would likely take $800 to $1,000 of mix in my area. Second, it looks like you only put in enough mix to build up about a 4 inch depth of the mix, or about 1/3 to 1/2 as much as you really should have used. Root vegetables like carrots can grow fairly deep. Straw and sticks like you used below the main mix layer is pitiful as a growing mix as there are few nutrients there. You need a deeper amount of mix. Third, Mel's mix compresses greatly as it gets rainfall or watered. A 10 inch fill can shrink down to about 6 inches. Your smaller amount of mix might soon be only 2 or 3 inches deep, giving your plants very little good mix to grow in unless you come back and top it off with more mix, thereby increasing the work and the expense. Fourth, Mel's mix causes plants to grown tons of very fine roots that weave and wrap around the mix. This is great for the plants, sure, but when you have to pull them out the Mel's mix tends to stick to the roots, meaning you will be discarding some of your mix with the plant material you remove. This too depletes the level of mix, causing you to need to refresh the mix every season. After considerable effort, I gave up on Mel's mix and moved on to an improved custom made mix that I now use with very good success. I also lowered my costs greatly by producing all the compost I need right on my own 20 acre homestead property. I now use about 50% compost rather than 1/3 as Mel uses. For another 25% of my mix, I combine peat moss and vermiculite or perlite. The remaining 25% of my mix consists of smaller 5% to 10% amounts of extra elements. One of the most important is vermicompost from my own site worm bin which I started. This is Black Gold for plant nutrition, being far richer than any compost! I like to have about 10% of the total mix as vermicompost. I add clean sand, such as would be for a sandbox, with a little local mineralized soil for about another 5%. I like to add up to 5% hardwood ashes (do not use softwoods.) For the remaining 5%, I like to toss in rich forest top soil, including leaf mold. This final 25% combination provides quite a lot of trace minerals and elements plants need but which IS NOT found in the 2/3rds of Mel's mix which consists of nothing more than but peat moss and vermiculite. Peat moss itself provides no nutritional value to the plants. Vermiculite really doesn't either. After getting a new bed set up with this custom mix, I keep it topped up with a mix of vermicompost and regular compost. In some beds, I mulch with clean broom sage straw, also grown on my property. As that straw rots, it simply adds more organic material to the soil. My mix is far higher in total nutrients plants need and has much more organic material than Mel's mix. It grows plants very well and the mix shakes off the plant roots when harvested much easier. AS the years go by, the mix gets steadily better due to the annual supplements of vermicompost and regular compost. The cost for the needed peat moss and vermiculite for my mix runs about $25 per 4 x 4 raised bed. My raised beds have 11 inch high sides. I like to fill them as full as possible. There are no sticks, rocks, bales of straw, or poor quality dirt in my beds. Every single inch of the material in the beds is 100% good growing mix so that no matter if the plant roots go all 11 inches to the bottom, they will still be intaking from the good growing mix. Not trying to diminish Mel's mix because I too bought his books and followed his methods at first. But I have also viewed a few other growing systems and pulled ideas from them to create a better mix that performs as well as anything Mel's mix does and costs less. Good luck with all your gardening. Thanks for sharing your videos.

Mel's mix looks mighty marvelous

Congrats on getting the beds rollin'! Fun project

Loving the whole garden uniform Rick😁 I especially dig that shirt 😊 that garden is gonna be rocking this summer 🌱🌱🌱

Great video!!

Great job! Love the shirt!!

I made a 3 layer tall concrete raised bed last year. I am planning #2 this year. Thanks for the ideas for building the soil.

Looks awesome. I came over from Ernie Hatmakers Sunday Shoutout.

Rick, this is a very good video with lots of learning for us as we are preparing for our garden this summer ☀️ Really priceless information thank you very much! Its fully watch my friend 😊🙏😊

You did a great job gentlemen. 😎

ur a real hard worker my friend

That's pretty cool man 😎

You need a lot of energy and power

Hi, admittedly, I skipped around a bit watching this, but I have to ask . . . were the big bags of perlite just for show, I didn't see you incorporate them into your mix, and I know Mel's mix doesn't call for perlite.

I understand the bucket as a measurement but don’t know how much to buy. I am planting 15 raised beds for a school garden and have the cubic feet needed for soil but I have to place an order from a supplier and can’t order in 5 gallon buckets. That’s all I see online from the sfg sites as well. Any idea anyone?

Why are you using weed barrier on top instead of at the bottom?

It is not easy to make garden bed its a lit of work.