I Dug a Trench and Filled With DEAD Plants - Here’s Why

Ajouté : 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]It's that time of year. If you haven't already, you're probably going to be starting to do this really soon. And that is topping off your beds for spring. In today's episode, I'm going to talk about three huge mistakes you don't want to make when topping off your beds for spring that can not only cost you dearly, but could also potentially just end up wasting a ton of money. Let's go.

[00:00:20]When we first filled these beds up, they were right up to the top. And if you've grown in raised beds before, you know that soil has this mysterious ability just to disappear. I've said before that there's like there's like an evil soil fairy that comes and just steals 25% of your bed. Like where does it go? It just completely disappears. Now, the more truthful answer is it just doesn't disappear. It actually compacts. Now, compaction is a very common process that happens when material breaks down. If you start with a bunch of wood chips, in two or three years, you'll ask yourself, where' the wood chips go? Well, it's because they degrade and they break down and that increases their surface area as they break down. And then eventually they just become part of the overall soil. And that's actually why it takes so long to build top soil. You know, they say it takes some people say it takes up to a hundred years to build one inch of top soil. And I believe it because if I'm not bringing in just piles and piles and piles of organic material and I'm relying just on like, you know, what I have around me to build up my soil, it's going to take us it's going to take a tremendous amount of time, probably about 100 years to build up an inch. But what's really nice is in raised beds, I can build up that soil just like that. And I I throw in all that beautiful soil and then it continues to break down. and it continues to degrade and continues to collapse in on itself. And rather than just continually filling in your bed, what you're essentially doing is you are over time, you're actually collapsing the soil to the point where it becomes compacted. Yes, I did say compacted. And I know a lot of you know that compacted soil is not good. And so, one of the first mistakes that we do as gardeners is we continue to apply compost. We continue to apply top soil or any type of soil into our raised beds with zero expectation of ever, maybe not the first year, maybe not the second year, but ever actually fluffing our soil. Now, I'm a huge advocate of no till. I think you know not tilling your soil is great but one thing that happens in no till as I'll show you is over time if we keep adding on 3 in this year 3 in next year 3 in the year after that what the result is is the very bottom of the soil just continues to get more and more and more and more compressed to the point where root penetration becomes very challenging And you're ultimately going to have a lot of irerration problems.

[00:03:00]Maybe not drainage. It probably drain just fine. Texture is going to be great, but it's going to be so small and so compressed that the roots are going to have a hard time really being encouraged to go down that far. And so by every once in a while flipping or fluffing your soil, I'll show you how we do it.

[00:03:18]And it's not every year, but we flip and fluff our soil about every two or three years just to add not only more organic material, but to turn some of that some of that really degraded soil down to the bottom up to the top. And it helps to kind of airate and fluff our soil so it's not just layer on top of layer on top of layer on top of layer until the end of time. So, as we begin to dig into our bed here, the first thing we notice is the top is really loose. It's wonderful. As we get down deeper, we start to notice it begins to become a little more compacted. And if I am to actually look here, so the first top little bit very loose, bottom little bit, I just kind have to scrape at it a little bit to break some soil off. at the very bottom of the bed here. If I get to down to the bottom, I'm actually really scraping. And I notice it cakes onto my fingers because the the texture is just so fine and so so broken down that the quality is great. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there's wonderful attributes, but the problem is is that plant roots like loose soil.

[00:04:34]They're not encouraged to go down into compacted soil. And over time, as soil degrades, it breaks down compost, organic material, right? It breaks that down into smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until it just becomes kind of a little silty. And that just breaks it down. And not even really silty, but just it breaks it down into the tiniest form possible to the point where there's really nothing left to break down. smaller. And so as a gardener, what I will do is I will bring in some fresh soil to kind of top it up.

[00:05:16]But I also take my shovel and give it a little give it a little flip and a plop.

[00:05:23]Now, I am turning the soil. Yes, I am.

[00:05:26]But it's because I'm turning that that really degraded stuff into the fresher mix. And I only do this about every two to three years. And it's just because in my experience, I find that the root penetration over the course of two to three years goes the roots are encouraged less and less and less to go down deep into the soil when there's so much, you know, so much compaction happening. So that's the first mistake is just not flipping your beds ever and just constantly topping them off. The second mistake that gardeners make when topping off their beds is presuming that they have to top it off with soil. Now, I know you're probably confused by that because it's like, "Okay, well, what else would I top my bed off with?" Oh, he's talking about compost or, "Oh, he's talking about No, I'm not even talking about any form of compost or top soil or anything." You don't need to top off your bed with fresh soil all the time when the soil quality is incredible.

[00:06:25]What you can do is you can actually do what's called trench composting. This actually not only builds the volume of the bed up, but it also breaks down slowly into organic material your plants can use. It's not only going to help to hold on to water, but it's also going to help plant roots to uh to obtain nutrients that otherwise would have had to be brought in by you. So, your soil is great. Your soil texture is awesome, right? Well, what do you do? Okay, just take your take your shovel. Dig yourself a little bit of trench here, 8 10 inches deep.

[00:06:58]Take some food scraps. Take some aged chicken manure. Take some rabbit poop. I saw some laying around here somewhere. I don't see there's some rabbit poop around here. Take some rabbit poop. Take some old stems, some old plant material.

[00:07:18]Chuck those into the trench. Just tuck chuck them in. Chuck them in just like that. 8 10 in deep.

[00:07:25]We do this in the fall with pumpkins.

[00:07:27]We'll get pumpkins on the side of the road. Throw the pumpkins right into the right into the trench. Old plant material, leaves, stems. I know you're thinking, Luke, what about crop rotation? Are you worried? No, I'm not.

[00:07:40]We have tons of videos on why crop rotation and repurposing things like tomato plants, pepper plants, squash plants, right?

[00:07:49]We're so paranoid about encouraging powdery mildew or or um tomato blight into our garden. It was already in there to begin with. It's a soilborn fungus.

[00:08:00]It comes from the soil, gets on your plants, which are the host. From there, it it turns into spores, spreads throughout the air, and where does it go? Into the soil. It was always in your soil to begin with. Unless we're living in a completely sterile environment on Mars, you're going to have it. You're absolutely going to have it. And so by filling this trench up with material, what are we not filling it up with?

[00:08:22]Soil. That means the soil that came from the trench can now sit on top of the plant material. It's going to break down slowly over time. And this allows us to actually fill up our bed.

[00:08:38]It allows us to fill up our bed.

[00:08:42]I only used a little bit of it, but I could in theory do a ton of it. do my whole bed and that's going to add volume to my bed that yes will break down but it doesn't have to be in the form of heavy bags of compost. It doesn't have to be in the form of expensive bags of compost. It can be using the good quality soil that we have and organic material that's laying around. Now, I want to be really clear.

[00:09:10]The next question you're going to ask is, isn't that going to break down and rob nitrogen from the soil? It can. It definitely can. But we always make an effort to apply a good all-purpose fertilizer, we also make an effort to when we're when we're using our trench composting, we're not composting just brown material. You know, you can use leaves, you can certainly use twigs, you can certainly use logs and things like that. I would not use wood chips.

[00:09:44]Why would I not use wood chips?

[00:09:47]Wood chips are going to because the surface area is so large, they're going to break down very fast and rob nitrogen from the soil. Leaves on the other hand, like fall leaves, fall leaves do contain a lot of nitrogen, but they mat and they compress. They actually don't have a lot of surface area. if they were shredded, if those leaves were shredded up, they're going to break down, but they're going to rob nitrogen from the soil. And until they're completely broken down, they're not going to release that nitrogen. So, I try to trench compost with things like food scraps, things that have nitrogen already in them, or I like to um I like to add stuff like with our potatoes, we'll add alalfa pellets.

[00:10:27]super high source of nitrogen, great organic uh organic material source, and it overall is going to give volume to the bed while preventing robbing nitrogen from the soil, and it's going to give back to the earthworms and your plants. It's awesome. And the third mistake, and this is probably the biggest mistake I see gardeners making when topping off their beds for spring, and that is assuming that they have to go with compost. This is going to be a hot take. I'm definitely going to read it in the comment section. I do every time I talk about this. It's not necessarily the most important thing in the world to use compost. Is it the best? In my opinion, yes. But if you don't have access to compost, if you don't have access to really high quality compost, bag compost at the store is not only very expensive, but it's sometimes no better off than top soil is. Now, quality does matter. Absolutely. Can you fill up your beds with clay? wouldn't recommend it, but it's all in how you amend. You see, the thing is, our beds can start with pure compost. But if you grow in pure compost for three or four years, and you don't amend, if you don't remend your soil, it's no better than top soil is. It's going to be void of nutrients and void of life. As it begins to break down and degrade, like we talked about in point one, it also loses nutrients due to leeching. And so this pile of this pile of top soil we have behind us here, it is dark. It is really beautiful stuff, but we wouldn't use it on its own. We're going to amend. We're going to amend with less compost or we might amend with an all-purpose fertilizer. We're going to amend with maybe some gypsum to loosen it up. You can use what you have on hand. You know, there's plenty of people for quite literally millennia that have grown in clay soil. Look at gardens down south that are dark red clay. Well, growing in clay would seem like the worst thing in the world, but it's how they amend it. They amend it by breaking it down with gypsum. They break it down with compost. They break it down with manure. They break it down with smaller inputs that overall add to a greater result, which is that it allows them to use what they have. And it unlocks some really great benefits that come from top soil that come from clay.

[00:12:54]And so you don't have to go with compost. Even here on the farm, we fill up our raised beds with mostly compost, but compost is very expensive. And so what we'll do is we'll we'll fill up our beds with let's say 50 to 75% of this really good quality nothing wrong with it top soil. How I know is it came from when we scraped the pond. We had a all these piles of top soil here are from when we actually did the earth work where the barn was. We scraped that because there's a barn sitting on top of it. Might as well use it. Where we had the pond well there's water there now.

[00:13:30]So now there's top soil. And so everywhere we scraped, we actually just had them pile up the top soil. It's great stuff. It's really great. It's wonderful, wonderful soil. Is it wonderful long-term? No. But it's how we amend it. And so often times I feel like gardeners are so black or white. It's like it either has to be compost or no guard at all. Compost is by far the best, but it's also by far the hardest to come by and the most expensive unless you make it yourself, which we have lots of videos on how to do that. But I think a lot of people just get discouraged because it's like, "Oh, I don't have compost. My garden's going to suck." No, you have plenty of resources that you can use to top off your beds, but you have to learn how to amend those things that might be slightly less high quality, right? You can save a little bit of money by going with a really high quality top soil.

[00:14:20]And top soil is what? Broken down compost. That's right. Oh my gosh, you guys are so smart. How'd you know that?

[00:14:27]It's almost like I talked about it in the first point, but yeah, that's what it is. Top soil is just broken down organic material, just keeps breaking down. So, it's going to have a lot of those benefits that compost once had, just it loses a lot of the porocity, a lot of the sponginess. Um, so that's why we we just want to bring those qualities back with a little bit of fresh compost.

[00:14:45]You don't need to fill up your whole bed with compost. So, those are three critical mistakes that I see gardeners make when they're topping off their beds. I hope you guys enjoyed. I hope you all learned something new. And I really do hope that you have fun in your garden this year. That's what it's all about. We're just having fun. We're having fun. We're growing plants, getting fresh air, getting some sunshine, and uh that's what I'm all about at least. So, as always, this is Luke from the Marner channel reminding you to like this video, subscribe if you haven't already, and we'll catch you all on the next episode. Grow bigger, everybody. See you. Bye. Hey, thank you so much for watching today's video. I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed, consider clicking this one. You'll probably enjoy it just as much. I want to thank you for your viewership because without it, this channel would not be as amazing as it is. Also, if you haven't subscribed, consider subscribing. It's free and we upload videos every Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. We also have vegetable seeds, fertilizer, or tools.

[00:15:33]If you need any of those, consider visiting migrer.com. Links will be in the description box below. We've got you covered. And as always, we'll see you all in the garden. Take care. Bye.