Minibed Gardening 7 Year Update & How To Make The Bed Frames
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- čas přidán 15. 03. 2024
- This gardening experiment continues. Here's a Minibed Gardening infrastructure report as I head into my 8th growing season.
The Minibed Gardening Trilogy PDF download is available here:
www.planetwhizbang.com/gardening
See selected Minibed Gardening CZcams videos here:
www.planetwhizbang.com/minibe... - Jak na to + styl
Thank you for sharing your method. I am starting my first season with mini beds. Looking forward to many seasons of gardening. with this method. I am in my 78th season myself and find this method to make gardening manageable.for someone my age and ability.
We call that orange twine universal rope. Use as much as needed to tie anything up. Then just cut it off! We keep ours in a 5 gal bucket w/ lid with a small hole to pull it out.
Fabulous video! I was gonna ask why you chose 28.5 inches but then I realized that with your offset (spiral?) pattern you get a 30" square bed. I use something similar over here in France. Every spring the local Brico Marche and sometimes supermarkets have small raised beds for about 12-13 euros. I have almost 30 of them now since I started buying them 5 years ago when we moved to France. They are 1 meter square with half-lapped joints and modular so you put together 10 pieces and they are about 8 inches high and 36 inches square of usable space. I just lay them out in a row and fill with dirt. The next year I pull them up and I have a raised bed. So now I have raised beds all over my half-acre garden. I am retired now but I used to be a market gardener so I grow a lot of food because I just can't help myself. This year I am going big-time on the Ruth Stout method. I got over a hundred nice straw bales for 3 euros apiece (cheap, cheap, cheap) last year and covered a lot of my garden over winter using about 50 of them. I then laid my potatoes on top of the old, rotted straw and covered with another layer of straw. I experimented with the Ruth Stout method when I was in NW Washington state but I had such a slug problem, I had to drop it. I have some slugs here in southern France, but nothing like the slugs in Washington. I grow rye and wheat every year for the biomass. Sometimes I harvest it, sometimes I don't. The rye gets over 6 feet tall. Both rye and buckwheat (another crop I grow) are reputed to change insoluble phosphorous to soluble phosphorous so I rotate them all over the garden.
As for the SPF, I am not surprised you are getting extra years of use. I built a cabin in northern Minnesota in 1976 out of balsam fir because it twists instead of warps as it dries. I put up green logs I dropped on site and set them in the ground palisade style without any preservative. I expected the cabin to last only 10 years because of the ends in the ground rotting, but it is still standing, almost 50 years later.
I bought a Planet Whizbang wheel hoe kit from you about 10-12 years ago. I wish I still had it but I couldn't ship all my tools to France. It worked great. It was expensive just for my reference books.
Untreated wood does ok if the wi ter freezes enough. I’m’ in france too 1nd mild wet winters make my woood3n beds last 3 years max
Very interesting, never seen this style before. Beautiful soil.
I assembled my frames and got my bunker cover staked down last night.
Nice video. I have to get my wife to watch this video.
I had made up my mind to quit gardening, the weeds were so much to tackle while I was working. Then I saw Herrick and I fell in love with minibeds!
Many many years ago, I read your blog the christian agrarian. I enjoyed seeing all your gadgets and ideas and am still telling all my chicken keeping friends about the plucker. How fun to accidentally find you on YT! :)
This low mini bed idea sounds great for me as I age. Even though it is low to the ground, it is easy to make by myself. Interesting that they held together so well without a corner piece on the inside!
What are the metal stakes for?
What do you do to kill off your rye or wheat that you plant in the beds?
I'm glad you found me here. The blog was titled, "The Deliberate Agrarian." I still blog, though much less, at www.Heavenstretch.com
The 3 stakes serve to index the frames into place. I like to undercut the rye crowns with a sharp, short hoe, leaving the considerable root mass in the undisturbed soil for the microherd to feed on. Amazing plant, that rye!
I miss the minibed garden.
Liked this. I save the screws when i remove them. The long #10s around here are $6 + per pound
1 pound of #10 x 3-1/2" at my local lumberyard yesterday was $11.69. 😳
Enjoyed the video. Nice garden area
Terrific!👍🙏✌️🇬🇧
Cool garden set up. Hard to decide if you are better at carpentry or gardening.
Wondering throughout the video how you keep the moles out
I've seen a mole in my garden only once in the decades I've gardened here. But there are mice. They do have runways under the plastic from bed to bed. The only crop they seem to bother is sweet potatoes, which I grew only once in Minibeds. But the mice eat my sweet potatoes wherever I plant them. I was told by someone who is Minibed gardening that he has rats that travel under the plastic. One of Eliot Coleman's books show that he uses rodent traps in his gardens (not Minibed gardens).I have two cats that frequent my garden and they are mousers. Unfortunately, they also use the Minibeds as litterboxes. Thus, the hardware cloth "cat excluders" that go over some of the beds when they are first planted.
cool that the plastic lasted that long, here in Colorado it probably wouldn't. I may cover the plastic with mulch to shield from UV.. I dislike plastic so I'll probably choose thick mulch and some weeding and go with 4'x4' beds or 4x8 .... I have to raise or fence because of rabbits wabbitz wabbitz
Looking forward to many Minibed plantings this summer. I wonder how you are able to keep all those leaf mulches in place especially during the windy fall season.
If the leaves are shredded (or partially shredded with a lawnmower, which is what I do) very few blow out of the Minibeds. 👍
Why 28.5 square and not longer rectangular? Thanks for such a clear concise presentation.
Part of the "system" as I designed it (and hoped would work) is for there to be ample covered soil around each bed for the plantings in the beds to draw moisture from. The plastic cover holds moisture in. Smaller beds with lots of "captured" moisture around them means that I don't have to irrigate at all. With my climate, soil, and bed size/layout I don't have to water at all. BUT, at certain times and in very dry spells, I have used my bucket irrigation/fertigation idea to deep water certain crops, like tomatoes. The smaller beds are also, more easily managed than larger beds. 🙂
8ft 2x4 into 28.5 lengths means 10.5 scrap. I'd probably make the sides a bit longer... or maybe cut the 10.5 into 2 or 3 stakes.
I recommend using 2x4x10ft boards in my Minibed Trilogy PDF. A 10ft 2x4 will make 4 minibed sides with 5-6" of waste. Sometimes the lumber is split on the ends and that little bit of extra is not waste. The 10ft 2x4s are also usually of better quality lumber than the standard 2x4 stud material. 👍
@@herrickkimball They don't sell 10 footers around here anymore.
I just gather wood out of trash piles and out of dumpsters at demo jobs.
I don't have to tell an old carpenter like you that soft wood rots faster than dense wood.
Pressure treated, southern yellow pine will last for decades if you don't mind the copper fungicide they are treated with. If pressure treated is a go-to for you, then southern yellow pine is the most readily available wood that will last a long time.
When I was just getting started collecting 2x4s I took whatever I could find. Now I have a source for yellow pine pallet wood so I am cutting side pieces out of that.
I build rabbit cages with bottoms made of 16" wire shelving. Two pieces wired together make a 32" wide cage bottom. So my minibeds
Are 31x31 outside so the cage can sit on top of the frame when I grow forage for the rabbit.
So, i cut mine 29-1/2" to fit my cages. I recall that you originally sized your frames for a commercially avasilable clotch then they stopped making them.
I pre-drill the two holes on one end.
It helps a lot to get screws or nails where I want them to go in straight without splitting the wood.
I am building some with # 16 galvanized nails. I like screws but there may come a day when power isn't available to drive screws.
Galvanized nails will last forever.
Thanks for all you do.
Herrick, lovely inspiration. I started setting up my minibeds on billboard tarps last year. I have room for 88 minibeds but only got 11 installed last year. Do you use Phillips or star drive deck screws?
Have you tried charring the wood with a torch to make the lumber last longer? I've also seen some people that then using linseed oil to treat the lumber?
Charring the wood is an idea that never occurred to me, but should have. The experiment continues.... I'll char some of these new frames. Thanks for the comment! 👍
@@herrickkimball Charring plus linseed oil is an old Japanese technique that supposedly makes wood last 25+ years outdoors. I haven't been an adult long enough to test that assertion, though.
Where does the rain water go?
What doesn't land on the beds flows to the lawn surrounding the garden.
Greetings,
Where are you located? I am located in the Capital District. What are you planning to grow 2024 season?
Cheers,
Upstate NY
What are the frames for if the bed is notraised ? Mulch retention ?
The frames weight the plastic down so it doesn't blow up. They also serve as a convenient place to secure various insect netting, plastic cloche "appliances." and "cat excluder" hardware cloth. I have numerous videos showing that. And the frames can be easily removed for putting organic materials under the plastic all around the bed (another video). And, yes to some degree, they contain mulching material.
What mil did you use for the bunker cover ? I used the billboard plastic in my mini bed garden and it is starting to get brittle (5 yrs)
6Mil.
From Here: farmplasticsupply.com/24-widebc?tracking=587690470d9c5
Would it be economical to replace your wood with cinder blocks as the beds deteriorate? It might cost more than wood overall, but one or two at a time should be manageable and cost effective, and you won't have to replace them again! Just a thought!😊❤
That is an option. But in addition to weighting down the plastic, the wood frames serve as a place to secure insect netting or plastic cloche covers, as shown in some of my videos. Also, the frames can be easily removed when putting organic materials under the plastic mulch all around the bed. That is a soil-building, microherd-feeding technique I also show in a video. Concrete blocks can be removed but they are heavy and, that being the case, they wouldn't get moved as readily as the light wood frames. When something is harder to do it usually doesn't get done. Thanks for the comment. 👍
That plastic will eventually break down into the soil and can't be a good system on a large scale environmentally.
I used to think that. Polyethylene plastics are the most stable of plastics. They have been used as a soil mulch for the past 60 years. I could find no evidence that polyethylenes leach any chemicals into the soil, or that the plastic is harmful to the soil in any way. Polyethylene mulches are USDA organic approved. Nevertheless, you might be right. 🙂