How to Treat Organic Vegetable Soil

How to Treat Organic Vegetable Soil [Music Playing] Oh! Hi. This is the start of the vegetable garden. Last year, I came here and we built these raise beds. And now we’re in the process of putting stuff in it. You know, all the different things have to go in it. So come over here, I’ll show you—take a closer look at the raised bed and I’ll tell you what we put in it so far. Okay so here we have a raise bed. Now, the raise—this wood here is untreated wood. What we did with it initially was actually we created with the citrus and I have the citrus here. I can show you what. This is a citrus. If you want to treat your raised bed with, the citrus—it’s just a basic, it’s a pure clean citrus product. It doesn’t have petroleum in it and the way you treat the wood is you basically paint it on after a while close. It’s just like this. It’s—it whether, and you don’t really see any, you don’t see this but I’m just showing to you know because this soaks right into the wood, you see. And it protects the wood from carpenter ants, termites, and makes the wood last for—and that will eventually dry. This is just like the rest of it is because this was done a couple about almost two years ago. We make them, put the raised beds together. So that’s one thing you do with a raised bed. Never use treat—pressure treated wood. Then the other thing we did was underneath here, we have a wire mesh for golfers. We have two wires. We overlay them, quarter inch wire, a chicken wire. A quarter inch chicken wire overlaid on top of each other. That was laid down here for golfers so golfers don’t come up in here and the bed is also—naturally, a normal bed because if you look, you see it’s twice as big. This is the normal size of a bed right here. This section here but we made it twice as big. And this was made for a guy just like me, a tall guy so he can reach into the center. If those, you know, you are a short person, you would have to dive into to get to the front so normally the bed could me made a little shorter. So this bed is a little bit bigger because you know it’s like, I can reach into the center but most people like can’t. You’ll see the bed made a little shorter and not so big, maybe half the size here for an average person but this really a very nice bed. We use it all the time. Right now, it’s in the process of taking a little rest, we would rotate the soil. We have all kinds of compost we added to in here. We had a variety of a couple of different types of rock dust to it. We have—we don’t have to have fertilizer but we’d make a lot but we do usually add piling soil. Organic piling soil to it because basically will make a container. And if you look over there, you see there’s a drip system that’s hooked into it and runs right underneath here. It’s actually a soaker system or the water is below ground. And this is just starting. This bed here we’ll make it, it comes almost to the top. So this stuff here is just cooking now because we put the bottom layer down into the top layer. We’re going to add some more not so rich compost because you don’t want the bed to be so rich you can’t plant anything and it’ll burn it but it’ll be a mixture of potting soil, I like that like a mix, it’s a really nice acid. If you want this to be at slightly acid mixture so you add too much compost, ends to be into alkaline. And you wanted to come up about here. We’re going to do that in one of our next shows. And then at the top layer, this top layer will be some type of mulch. I like use the cello mix which is really nice, clean acid for acid plants. We’ll put that on top with the last mulch. And then we go back and we plant. There’s two beds here and you do at least two beds because you want to have one bed resting while one bed growing. This person here decides he wants to have them both growing at the same time so they mean they both have to rest at the same time but if you rotate it, and I keep telling him he’s juts lazy because he had so much to do here but normally what you do is that bed over there, I will go with peanuts. I will go with sunflowers. Anything else and that grow that ways, like a green manure. Then I will use my garden here then what I would do is rotate. I will grow peanuts over here and essentially I have to take everything out or you row it to there, or you turn it back into the ground over there, let that decompose to the—it’s green manure. All the green food goes back in. It takes about two or three months for that to happen, in term, you’re using stuff here. And then when you’re ready, you can switch. I have to admit to that work if I was to do both of these, I haven’t going all the time and with these raise beds, you do with practice with slow rotation. But one of the things as I get older, I’m getting—I don’t like to anymore work and I have so instead of doing slow rotation, or even crop rotation—if you have several different beds, crop rotation is good. Basically, crop rotation means that if you're growing tomatoes in the same box every year, after year. You grow tomatoes over there you come back over here, going back and forth in tomatoes in different bed. Okay in the same things instead of going to the same box year after year, you go a corner over there, you go corner over here, go back and forth. After a while, you are going to bench and you always have to continue that and if you do it that way, you have to continue to add compost and mulch to this because it gives you everything. If you don’t, then you have to take a break. You have to take everything out, redo it again in last of few years. Well just—food disappears. As I get older, I’ve developed some interesting ways of doing this. One of the things you do is you bury worms, earthworms. You do a lot of earthworms here. Then you don’t need have to rotate the soil. The earthworms will just multiply and will grow. That’s what’s the process of what we’re doing here, we’ll be installing some earthworms. They’re called the African red wigglers. Just by a 100 worms and they will just multiply like crazy. You just have to make sure you’ve got plenty of drainage since you’re not using any chemicals. One of the things we add to this is coffee grinds, lots of coffee grinds is going to be added to it. Coffee grinds is your easiest way to control slugs and snails. Just coffee, a simple coffee grinds. And so we’re going to—in the next few months, you’re going to see me coming back here. We’re going to be getting this garden in shape. It’ll be producing. We’re going to video tape all way through from beginning to end. This is a continuing process because this is something you want to do all the time. You know, the person here basically, he is kind of screwed up a little bit. He would bough a packet of lettuce seeds and he dump the whole things and he have all these lettuce growing at the same time, and that’s what not you want to do. We’re going to show you all of these things. Normally, you do by 10 lettuces every two weeks. You can start it with every two weeks. Then we have to continuos source. So we’re going to work on this and doing it on the next few months. And then let’s go and take a look at the rest of the garden and before we do that, then we’re going to go and do my mad scientist segment, we’re going to mix something together. And then I’m going to show you how to mix my three favorite things together. We’re going to be mixing the orange TKO citrus with this hot chili sesame oil, and then this is a natural soap. I can’t already show you the label. We should have to cover it. So I’m just going to show you the back of it or maybe like this. It’s a natural soap, okay. We’re going to mix these three—any kind of natural soap will work. Any type of natural citrus product will work and of course any type of natural hot chili. [Music Playing]