Making raised garden beds the laziest way possible

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Well, hello. It's officially growing season here, so I'm gonna be creating my garden beds today. Hopefully, that's my goal. And my dad gave me a bunch of pallets. And he also gave me a bunch of starters.

[00:00:14]>> That entire line is cucumbers.

[00:00:16]>> Nice.

[00:00:18]>> And this is the beginning of the tomato planting. I'm going to do one more line of tomatoes and then >> uh it'll be hot peppers and then it'll be eggplant.

[00:00:31]>> Sweet.

[00:00:32]>> And I bought one additional. This is a grape tomato I got from Stanley.

[00:00:39]>> Yeah, I'll try and plant them tomorrow >> if I can. I'll do my best.

[00:00:44]>> Even though there's two growing together, cucumbers don't mind growing close to each other. So take I mean do you do you want those two plus another one?

[00:00:54]>> Sure.

[00:00:55]>> Okay.

[00:00:55]>> Thanks.

[00:00:56]>> Mhm.

[00:00:57]>> So hopefully I can get all of it done today. It is 90° Fahrenheit out. The last frost date was only like a couple days ago and already the weather has swung into the other direction. So obviously I would prefer to not do this when it's this hot out. But I'm going to stay mostly in the garage for the labor intensive parts and then uh be out in the sun hopefully just for little bits at a time. So, let's build some garden beds.

[00:01:28]The garage is still a bit of a mess cuz I have not cleaned or organized it at all.

[00:01:37]Ah, we got palette number one.

[00:01:42]I should probably have gloves on.

[00:01:46]I watched a lot of raised garden bed YouTube videos uh made with pallets and there were a lot of different ways to do it. There's one way that's used the most and that's to split it into thirds.

[00:01:59]However, I like the idea of the garden bed being a bit taller than that cuz that would only be like a foot and a half. One design I saw was to split the pallet directly in half. And since I do have a good amount of pallets that my dad gave me from his work, I have enough materials where I think that will work.

[00:02:24]49 in 24.5 right here.

[00:02:40]Lots of spiders on here.

[00:02:47]I had to switch saws a few times because I don't have a saw multi-tool and so with all the different angles and depths, I had to try a few different techniques. Also, I hate using the circular saw. So, anytime I could switch to the jigsaw or handsaw, I did.

[00:03:27]Jeez Louise, that was rough.

[00:03:44]It got so hot that I had to wait for the sun to go down uh for it to cool down. I think it's like it's 84 now, which is a lot more bearable. And you know, without the the sun blazing, um even like the garage is so uninsulated, there's so many cracks that it's like being in a sauna pretty much. So, I cut up four of these. I didn't show you the doing the other one cuz it was taking forever. And now I'm going to take them over to where I want the garden to be.

[00:04:46]H. It's going to be janky, but that's okay.

[00:04:51]I can do what I want cuz it's my garden bed. Let's think this through.

[00:05:05]Oh, if I go inside.

[00:05:10]Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.

[00:05:15]Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Hang on.

[00:05:20]We got something now. It's just my first one, so it's okay.

[00:05:28]Let me get a nail in here. I also don't know where my screwdriver is.

[00:05:33]Feel like it's in Gavin's car.

[00:05:42]Yes, I'm a genius.

[00:05:49]I'm just using very random nails. I'll let that be known.

[00:06:02]Look at this guy.

[00:06:06]Wow, it's a square.

[00:06:09]Looks crazy. Okay, I am going to fill it up while there is still some light in the sky.

[00:06:20]Now, around here, there's a lot of bark and twigs.

[00:06:25]So, that's a good start.

[00:06:31]I saw a video on the interwebs of someone creating what they call a compost lasagna in their raised garden bed. They had sticks and rotten logs at the bottom, weeds, especially dandelions, grass cutings, leaves, and they just kept building the layers. So, that's what I decided to try since I needed a lot of stuff to fill it up.

[00:07:29]Look at everybody hanging out.

[00:07:31]>> It's kind of heavy.

[00:07:34]>> And it's still a lot of I mean, it didn't It's old.

[00:07:38]>> It's over a year old, so it's ready.

[00:07:44]>> Ready?

[00:07:44]>> Thank you. Yeah.

[00:08:07]There were some nice native soil pockets around my yard kind of in the outskirts as well as the pots of dirt from last year's greenhouse failure where all of them died because it got too hot in there. But for the top layer, I used this potting mix from the garden store since I don't have a mature compost pile yet.

[00:08:35]It had been raining all week, so these planters and buckets filled with rain water, so I just used those to water the soil down.

[00:09:29]I'm going to make another garden bed today and it's so cramped in the garage.

[00:09:35]So, I'm going to be working out here.

[00:09:36]And now I think I have a much better hang of how to do it.

[00:09:58]Hey, hey, hey.

[00:11:42]This pile of rotting logs was left by the previous owner and it's really been coming in handy.

[00:12:10]Under all those logs I hauled away was a good pile of decomposed wood soil. So, I filled my cart with that and used that as a layer in my lasagna. Then, of course, more weeds and leaves. Then, even more of that stump soil. Can't forget my fowl manure. And lastly, just one bag of potting mix for this guy.

[00:12:34]It's beautiful to see the difference in color of the different soil mixes.

[00:12:44]Heat. Heat.

[00:13:14]Tada!

[00:13:16]I have two raised garden beds that I made all by myself. Some of these plants aren't looking so good. And I think that might be because it's been raining for a week straight.

[00:13:32]I just saw the woodchuck just ran like sprinted that way. He just ran down the driveway at full speed. That was crazy.

[00:13:42]So, my plan is to make more garden beds.

[00:13:45]At least two more. I would love to have six total. I mean, maybe even more.

[00:13:50]That'd be really cool. Like, just this whole area would be a grid of garden beds. I really like that idea. Right now, this top is just soil. And so I might do either mulch or some sort of weed barrier. My dad was saying it'd be good to have something to stop weeds coming up or just having to like manage that. I still have a good amount of leaf piles under the trees, so I could just grab that and put that in here or use actual mulch. The plants might be a little too close together. I'm not totally sure yet. I think I'm just going to keep an eye on them and see how they do. Most of them, especially tomatoes, need a trellis or a cage. I have a plan for a trellis connecting these two boxes together. So, it would be like a walkway through. Like, it would be really magical. That's my plan. Speaking of the woodchuck, we have a lot of woodchucks, rabbits, and deer. And I think that it'd be pretty tough for the rabbits to get up here. I think woodchucks could climb this easily.

[00:14:57]Uh, and the deer obviously can reach it.

[00:15:00]So, I am brainstorming a good plan to keep them away with what type of fencing or just barrier I want to have around here. I want I still want it to look decent. So, we'll see what that ends up being. Gavin was thinking of staining the pallets, maybe like a darker brown just to have it look a little more natural, a little less like I slapped a bunch of palettes together. I mean, it's not a bad thing, but it would look a lot better and like some of this jankiness would kind of disappear if it was a darker stain on it and it would protect the wood a little better. So, with the other garden beds, obviously, I hope to plant more vegetables. And then in between here, maybe I'll add some pollinators if there's room. Still kind of I'm obviously new to this, so I'm seeing what makes sense, what will work.

[00:15:51]I'll be sort of experimenting, I guess.

[00:15:54]But I know people do marold and basil around tomatoes, so I'm just gonna see.

[00:15:59]There's so many spiders and ants, which is cool. That's fine. You guys enjoy yourselves.

[00:16:08]But that's all for now. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.

[00:16:14]Willy.

[00:16:18]The life of Rosland is the life for me.