- 1 day ago
🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com
It is a Saturday morning in early April. You drive home from the home improvement store with four cedar boards, a bag of fasteners, and three big bags of premium garden soil strapped down in the back of the truck. Two hundred and twenty dollars total. You spent all afternoon yesterday watching videos and reading articles about raised bed gardening, convinced this would be the year you finally grow your own tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, and herbs. No more grocery store produce. No more sixty-dollar produce bills every week. Just fresh garden vegetables grown right outside the kitchen door.
You assemble the bed in the back yard, dump the soil in, plant your seedlings, water everything thoroughly, and stand back proudly. Three months later, the bed is a disaster. The tomato plants have stopped growing. The lettuce went bitter and bolted to seed in week six. The peppers never produced. The soil has compacted into a hard crust. Half the seedlings died. The whole bed yielded maybe fifteen dollars worth of edible food from your two hundred and twenty dollar investment.
You did everything the You
It is a Saturday morning in early April. You drive home from the home improvement store with four cedar boards, a bag of fasteners, and three big bags of premium garden soil strapped down in the back of the truck. Two hundred and twenty dollars total. You spent all afternoon yesterday watching videos and reading articles about raised bed gardening, convinced this would be the year you finally grow your own tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, and herbs. No more grocery store produce. No more sixty-dollar produce bills every week. Just fresh garden vegetables grown right outside the kitchen door.
You assemble the bed in the back yard, dump the soil in, plant your seedlings, water everything thoroughly, and stand back proudly. Three months later, the bed is a disaster. The tomato plants have stopped growing. The lettuce went bitter and bolted to seed in week six. The peppers never produced. The soil has compacted into a hard crust. Half the seedlings died. The whole bed yielded maybe fifteen dollars worth of edible food from your two hundred and twenty dollar investment.
You did everything the You
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00It is the first warm Saturday in April.
00:03You drove to the lumber yard yesterday, picked up the wood, and you have spent the morning
00:08building four raised bed boxes in your backyard.
00:11The beds look beautiful, squared corners, fresh sawdust still on the lawn, the wood smelling
00:17clean in the spring air.
00:19You bought topsoil from the garden center to fill them.
00:22You ordered seeds.
00:23You bought small starter plants, tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, herbs.
00:30You put them all in the ground that afternoon, and you stand there in the late sunlight with
00:35your hands on your hips, and you have never been more proud of anything in your life.
00:40Then July comes.
00:41The tomatoes are pale and stunted, the lettuce bolted to seed in the heat.
00:46The peppers never set fruit.
00:48Half the cucumbers died from some wilt you cannot identify.
00:51The soil in the beds has compacted into something that looks like concrete.
00:56You water more.
00:58The leaves wilt worse.
00:59The neighbor's tomato plants, two doors down, are eight feet tall and dripping with fruit.
01:05Yours barely cleared two feet.
01:07You stand at the back door looking at what was supposed to be your kitchen garden, and
01:12you ask yourself the same question every first-year gardener asks.
01:16What did I do wrong?
01:18Now I want you to sit with this.
01:20The answer is not in the seeds.
01:22The answer is not in your watering schedule or your fertilizer.
01:26The answer was decided before you planted the first seed.
01:30Every single decision you made when you built and filled those beds, the location, the soil,
01:36the spacing, the depth, the orientation to the sun, determined whether your garden would
01:42feed your family or break your heart.
01:44I am Elias Yoder.
01:46I am Amish, and I farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
01:50The Pennsylvania Dutch have been growing kitchen gardens in raised beds for over 300 years, since
01:56the first German families came over the ocean and settled here in 1683.
02:01The four-bed kitchen garden, the path between the beds, the orientation to the sunny side
02:07of the house, every detail of what we now call raised bed gardening, was figured out by my
02:13great-great-grandmother's mother in the old country and carried over in a wooden chest
02:18along with the seeds.
02:19Today, I am going to walk you through nine mistakes that ruin a first-year raised bed garden.
02:25Every one of them learned the hard way by some beginner somewhere.
02:28Every one of them avoidable.
02:30Every one of them grounded in real horticulture and 300 years of farm kitchen tradition.
02:36Get these nine things right before you plant the first seed, and your garden will feed your
02:41family every summer for the rest of your life.
02:44Quick word before we go further.
02:45The old methods my family uses.
02:48There is more of it than fits in any one video.
02:51I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
02:55The book is the long version.
02:57If you want it, it is there.
02:59I will not mention it again.
03:01Now, the nine mistakes, plainly.
03:04Mistake 1.
03:06Building your garden in the wrong place.
03:08This is the most important decision you will ever make about your garden, and the hardest
03:13one to fix once it is wrong.
03:14Where you put the beds determines everything.
03:17The rule for the Northern Hemisphere, the United States, Canada, Europe, is to orient
03:23your garden to the south.
03:25Most vegetables and most herbs need 6 to 8 hours of direct sunlight per day to grow well.
03:30The south-facing side of your house, your barn, your fence, is the side that gets sun all
03:36day from morning to evening.
03:38Build your garden there.
03:39The mistake new gardeners make is putting the beds wherever there is empty space.
03:44Behind the garage, against the north side of the house, under a maple tree, next to a
03:50tall fence on the south.
03:51All of these become shade gardens by accident.
03:54And shade gardens grow lettuce, spinach, and herbs.
03:57They do not grow tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, or beans.
04:02If you wanted to grow shade-tolerant crops, that would be fine.
04:06But most folks build a raised bed garden because they want tomatoes and peppers, and those crops
04:12will not produce in less than 6 hours of direct sun.
04:15The old Pennsylvania German farmers chose their garden location before they even built the
04:22house.
04:22The early settlers' wills and farm records show that the kitchen garden was always placed
04:28on the sunny side of the dwelling, northeast, east, southeast, south, or southwest, and on
04:36mildly sloping terrain so water would drain off the paths.
04:40This was 300 years ago.
04:42The principle has not changed.
04:45Before you build a single bed, go out into your yard and watch where the sun falls.
04:51Spend a Saturday morning, a Saturday noon, and a Saturday evening watching the shadows
04:56move across your property.
04:59Where does direct sun fall for 6 or more hours?
05:03That is where your garden goes.
05:05If you have a smart phone, there is a free website called suncalc.net that will show you
05:11the sun's path across your exact property for any day of the year.
05:16Use it.
05:17Pick the right spot the first time.
05:20Get this one wrong and nothing else you do can save your garden.
05:25Get it right and most of the other mistakes become much easier to fix.
05:31Mistake 2.
05:32Not planning for water.
05:34Raised beds dry out faster than ground gardens.
05:37The soil sits above the natural water table, the wood walls heat up in the sun, and the
05:44increased drainage that makes raised beds so productive in spring becomes a problem in
05:49July when the temperatures hit 90 degrees and your beds need water twice a day.
05:54The mistake new gardeners make is not thinking about how they will water the garden when summer
06:00arrives.
06:01On a cool Saturday in April when you build the beds, water seems easy.
06:07The soil is moist, the air is cool, rain comes every few days.
06:12By the third week of July, the beds are dry within 24 hours of watering, your tomatoes are
06:19dropping their flowers from heat stress, and you cannot keep up with a watering can.
06:23Two paths forward, both real, both work.
06:28Path 1, Drip Irrigation.
06:31A system of small black tubes running along the surface of each bed, with tiny emitter
06:37holes that release water slowly to each plant.
06:40Costs about $50 to $150 for a kit that covers 4 to 6 beds.
06:46Once installed, you set a timer and the garden waters itself on a schedule.
06:51This is what most serious gardeners eventually do.
06:56Path 2, Hand Watering with a Schedule.
06:59Walk out to the garden every morning at 6 o'clock with a watering can or a hose.
07:05Water each bed slowly and deeply for 2 to 3 minutes per bed.
07:09Costs nothing.
07:11Works perfectly if you actually do it every day, including the days when you don't feel
07:17like it.
07:17The mistake is not the watering can.
07:20The mistake is not deciding which path you are going to take and then sticking to it.
07:26What the old folks did, Esther's grandmother carried water from the cistern in tin buckets
07:32every morning before breakfast for 60 years without missing a single day.
07:37That is hand watering.
07:40It works.
07:41But you have to decide you are going to do it and then actually do it.
07:45Pick your path before you plant.
07:48And do not plant a garden you cannot water consistently.
07:52You are setting up failure before the seeds go in the ground.
07:57Mistake 3, Cheap garbage soil that ruins the bed for years.
08:03This is the most expensive mistake on the list.
08:05Not because the soil is expensive, but because cheap soil kills the garden for 2 or 3 years
08:12before you figure out what went wrong.
08:15The mistake new gardeners make is ordering topsoil, or raised bed mix, from the cheapest
08:22source they can find.
08:24What gets delivered is often clay-heavy fill dirt with a small amount of compost mixed in
08:30to make it look dark.
08:31It looks like good garden soil.
08:34It is not.
08:35Inside 3 weeks the clay particles bind together, the bed compacts into something the roots cannot
08:41penetrate, water either runs off the surface or pools and sits, and your plants stunt and
08:48die.
08:49What the soil needs to be, plainly.
08:52Three parts in roughly equal proportions.
08:55One third compost.
08:57Real finished compost.
08:59Multiple sources blended together if possible.
09:02Kitchen scrap compost, leaf mold, aged manure.
09:06The compost feeds the soil microbes that feed the plants.
09:11One third aeration material.
09:14Perlite, pumice, or coarse sand.
09:16This keeps the soil loose enough that roots can spread and water can move through without
09:22compacting.
09:23One third water retention material.
09:26Heat moss, coconut coir, or composted bark.
09:30This holds moisture in the soil between waterings.
09:33That recipe – one third compost, one third aeration, one third water retention – is
09:40the standard professional raised bed mix that horticulture researchers and serious market
09:46gardeners have settled on.
09:47Build your beds to that recipe and you will have beds that produce well from year one.
09:53If you cannot afford to fill your beds entirely with that mix, the budget alternative is to fill
09:59the bottom half of each bed with your own native topsoil, whatever soil is already on your
10:05property, and the top half with a good mix of compost, native soil, and aeration.
10:12Half native soil, half quality amendments works for the first year.
10:17Then you add more compost every fall.
10:19In Pennsylvania German tradition, the kitchen garden soil was rebuilt every fall.
10:26Manure from the barn, kitchen scraps, leaves raked from the yard, ash from the wood stove,
10:32all layered into the beds and turned in before winter.
10:37300 years of that practice built farm soils so rich that walnut trees would not even grow
10:43on them.
10:43The soil was too fertile.
10:46Walnut trees prefer poor soil.
10:48The old farmers used wild walnut trees as their guide.
10:52Where the walnut tree grew strong, the soil was poor.
10:56Where the walnut tree refused to grow, the soil was perfect for vegetables.
11:02Do not skimp on the soil.
11:04Everything else in this video matters less than what you fill the beds with.
11:10Mistake 4.
11:11Not mulching the top of the soil.
11:14This is the mistake most new gardeners do not even know is a mistake.
11:18They build the beds.
11:20They fill them with good soil.
11:22They plant the seeds and the starter plants.
11:24And then, they leave the top of the soil bare and brown all summer.
11:29Bare soil is dead soil.
11:32Direct sunlight kills the microbial life in the top inch of the bed.
11:36Moisture evaporates within hours of watering.
11:40The soil crusts over and water runs off rather than soaking in.
11:45Weeds, which love bare disturbed soil, sprout faster than your vegetables.
11:51And the structure of the soil itself breaks down as wind, rain, and sun pound it day after
11:58day.
11:59Mulch fixes all of it.
12:01Mulch is any organic covering laid over the top of the soil to protect it, like a quilt
12:07over a bed.
12:08Two to three inches of mulch on top of your raised bed soil does five things at once.
12:14Slows water evaporation.
12:17Your soil stays moist longer between waterings.
12:21Cools the soil surface.
12:23Protects microbial life from direct sun.
12:26Suppresses weeds.
12:28Weeds cannot sprout under mulch.
12:31Adds organic matter over time.
12:33As the mulch breaks down, it feeds the soil.
12:37Protects soil structure.
12:39The bed does not compact under hard rain.
12:42What to use for mulch?
12:44Shredded straw is the best all-around choice for vegetable beds.
12:48Cheap, light-colored to reflect heat, breaks down into nice soil amendment by fall.
12:54Ester uses straw on the kitchen garden.
12:58Aged grass clippings work well if you have a lawn.
13:01Let them sit in a pile for a week to dry before applying.
13:05Pine needles work in some bed types.
13:08Wood chips or bark mulch work for pathways between beds but should not be used inside vegetable
13:14beds.
13:16Uncomposted wood chips temporarily steal nitrogen from the soil while they break down, which
13:21stunts the very plants you are trying to grow.
13:242-3 inches of mulch on every bed applied right after planting.
13:29Replace as it breaks down through the season.
13:32This is one of the cheapest improvements you can make to your garden and one of the most
13:36important.
13:38Mistake 5.
13:40Not leaving enough room to work between the beds.
13:43This is the mistake every new gardener makes once and never makes twice.
13:47You build the beds packed tight against each other or against fences because you are trying
13:53to maximize growing space.
13:56Then, in mid-July, when you need to harvest tomatoes from the back of the bed, you cannot reach
14:01without stepping in the soil and compacting it.
14:04The rule of thumb, leave at least two feet of clear pathway between every raised bed and
14:11between the beds and any fence or wall.
14:14Two feet is enough for an adult to walk through carrying a basket, kneel down to weed or harvest,
14:21and bring a wheelbarrow alongside the bed for clean-up.
14:25If you have older relatives helping in the garden, or you yourself are getting older, make the
14:30pathways three feet wide.
14:32The Pennsylvania Germans built their kitchen gardens with paths between the beds wide enough
14:38for a wheelbarrow because the same garden was worked by elderly grandmothers as well as
14:43young children.
14:45Generous paths mean every generation can still help.
14:49Inside the beds themselves, bed width matters too.
14:54Make each bed no wider than four feet across.
14:57That way you can reach the center of the bed from either side without stepping in.
15:03If the bed is against a wall and you can only reach from one side, make it three feet wide
15:08maximum.
15:09Anything wider than four feet means you cannot work the middle without disturbing.
15:16Before I walk through the last four mistakes, let me pause for a moment.
15:21The old ways only help if you actually use them.
15:25That is why we built our Amish home savings system and community, so you can work through
15:30the methods with us, ask questions, and stay consistent with other households doing the
15:35same work.
15:36The link is in the description.
15:38Now, the last four mistakes, plainly.
15:43Mistake 6.
15:44Planting tall growers in the wrong place inside the bed.
15:49This is a mistake of inches and degrees, but it ruins entire crops.
15:54The principle is simple.
15:56Inside a single raised bed, the tall plants go on the north side, the medium plants go in
16:02the middle, and the short plants go on the south side.
16:05Why?
16:07Because the sun moves across the sky from east to west, but it passes higher in the south
16:12than the north in the northern hemisphere.
16:15Tall plants on the north side of the bed catch full sun without shading the shorter plants
16:21south of them.
16:22Tall plants on the south side of the bed throw shadows over everything north of them, and the
16:28short plants underneath stop growing.
16:31Real example.
16:32You plant lettuce, beans, and trellised peas in a single bed.
16:37Lettuce is the shortest, 8 inches tall.
16:40Bush beans are medium, 18 inches tall.
16:43Peas climb a 4 foot trellis.
16:46Wrong order.
16:47Trellised peas on the south, beans in the middle, lettuce on the north.
16:52The peas throw shade over the beans.
16:55The beans throw shade over the lettuce.
16:58By July, the lettuce never headed and the beans produced half their normal crop.
17:04Right order.
17:05Lettuce on the south, beans in the middle, trellised peas on the north.
17:10All three crops get full sun.
17:12The peas climb tall without shading anything.
17:15The garden is happy.
17:17This same principle applies to summer crops.
17:20Plant peppers on the south side of the bed.
17:23Plant medium height tomatoes in the middle.
17:26Plant tall trellis tomatoes or pole beans on the north.
17:30Plant it on paper before you put a single plant in the ground.
17:35Mistake 7.
17:36Not preparing beds for winter.
17:38Most new gardeners think their job ends when the last tomato comes off the vine in October.
17:44They pull the plants, leave the bed bare, and walk away until April.
17:48That is exactly the wrong move.
17:51Bare soil through the winter is soil that loses what it built over the summer.
17:57Rain leaches nutrients out the bottom.
17:59Wind erodes the top.
18:01Sun, even weak winter sun, breaks down organic matter without anything replacing it.
18:07Microbial life in the soil dies off because there is no food source, and by April, the bed is harder,
18:15drier, and less alive than it was the previous October.
18:20What to do instead, plainly?
18:22After the last harvest, do not leave the bed bare.
18:27Three good options.
18:29Option 1.
18:30Heavy mulch layer.
18:32Apply 4 to 6 inches of straw or shredded leaves over the entire bed.
18:37Let it sit there all winter.
18:40The mulch protects the soil, slows water loss, and breaks down into organic matter you can turn
18:47into the bed in the spring.
18:48Option 2.
18:50Finished compost layer.
18:53Apply 2 inches of finished compost over the bed.
18:57Don't mix it in.
18:58Let it sit on top all winter.
19:01Worms and microbes will pull it down into the bed slowly.
19:05By spring, the top inch of your bed is rich, dark, microbe-active soil ready to plant.
19:13Option 3.
19:14Cover crop.
19:15Plant a fall cover crop like winter rye, hairy vetch, or crimson clover as soon as the
19:23last summer crop comes out.
19:25The cover crop grows through the fall, dies in deep winter cold, and lies on the surface
19:32as natural mulch and green manure.
19:34In the spring, you turn the dead growth into the bed, and it adds nitrogen and organic matter
19:41you did not have to pay for.
19:44The old Pennsylvania German farmers put a heavy layer of manure on the kitchen garden every
19:50November and let it sit all winter to feed the soil.
19:53300 years of that practice built the deepest, richest farm soils in America.
20:01Your garden does not need 300 years, but it does need you to do something every fall.
20:08Mistake 8.
20:10Not labeling and tracking what you planted.
20:14This sounds small.
20:16It is not.
20:17It is the mistake that kills more new gardeners over time than almost any other.
20:23Here is what happens.
20:25In April, you plant six different varieties of tomato in your beds.
20:29You know what you planted because you just put them in the ground 20 minutes ago.
20:35By July, the plants look similar.
20:38By August, you cannot remember which one was the Brandywine, which was the Cherokee Purple,
20:45which was the Roma.
20:47By September, you cannot remember what worked and what didn't.
20:52Next April, you plant the same varieties and make the same mistakes.
20:57Year after year, you never improve because you cannot remember what happened.
21:04The fix is simple.
21:06Label every plant, in every bed, every season.
21:11Use any system that works for you.
21:14Small wooden stakes with the variety name written in permanent marker, cheap, durable, traditional.
21:22Metal plant tags from the garden center, slightly more expensive but last for years.
21:29A garden journal, a small notebook where you draw a quick sketch of each bed and label
21:36what is planted where with the date.
21:39A simple page on your phone or computer, a list of which variety went where, when.
21:46The old Pennsylvania German farmers kept small cloth bags of saved seeds with the variety name
21:54written on each bag year after year.
21:57They also kept written records, family diaries, garden journals, farm ledgers, that tracked which
22:05varieties produced well which year in which bed.
22:09Some of these records still exist in historical archives.
22:14That is how they built 300 years of accumulated wisdom.
22:19What you measure, you can manage.
22:22What you track, you can improve.
22:25A garden you do not record is a garden you cannot learn from.
22:31Mistake 9 Starting too big in the first year.
22:35This is the mistake almost every excited beginner makes, including me when I first helped Esther
22:42expand the kitchen garden.
22:45You read books all winter.
22:47You watch gardening videos.
22:49You have your plans drawn up.
22:51And on the first warm Saturday in April, you build 8 raised beds and try to grow 40 different
22:58varieties.
22:59By the second week of August, you are exhausted, half the beds are full of weeds, three crops
23:06have failed because you could not keep up with everything, and you tell yourself you must
23:12not be a real gardener after all.
23:15The honest truth is plain.
23:17New gardens need attention every single day.
23:22Watering, weeding, mulching, harvesting, replanting, pest watching.
23:29A single 4 by 8 raised bed needs about 20 minutes of attention per day in peak summer.
23:35Two beds need 40 minutes.
23:38Eight beds need almost three hours per day.
23:41If you have a job, a family, and a home to manage, you cannot give a garden three hours
23:46per day in July.
23:48The rule, plainly, start with one or two beds the first year.
23:53No more.
23:54Learn how the soil behaves in your specific climate.
23:58Learn what your specific sun exposure is doing.
24:02Learn which crops you actually eat, not which crops you thought you would eat.
24:07Get one bed completely right soil, irrigation, mulch, planting layout, weeding routine before
24:15you expand to two.
24:17The Pennsylvania Germans built their gardens slowly over generations.
24:22The standard kitchen garden was four beds with a path between them, and that was enough
24:28to feed a family of eight for a year.
24:30Sometimes a household expanded to six beds when an older relative took over part of the
24:36garden in retirement.
24:37Even then, the additional beds were small ones added thoughtfully, not a doubling of the
24:44work overnight.
24:45Start small.
24:47Get it right.
24:48Add more next year if you want to.
24:51A small garden that succeeds is worth ten times more than a big garden that fails.
24:59Now I want to take a moment because here is where it all comes together.
25:03Look at what we have walked through.
25:06Nine mistakes that ruin a first-year raised bed garden.
25:10Wrong orientation, no water plan, cheap soil, no mulch, no room to work, tall plants shading
25:20short ones, bare winter beds, no labels or records, starting too big to manage.
25:28Every one of these mistakes has a fix that costs less than $10 and takes less than an afternoon.
25:35Every one of them has been understood by farmers and kitchen gardeners for 300 years since the
25:43first Germans brought their seeds and their garden methods across the ocean to Pennsylvania.
25:49The reason new gardeners make all nine mistakes is not because the answers are hidden.
25:55The reason is that nobody walked them through the answers before they grabbed the lumber and
26:01started building.
26:03You now know all nine.
26:05Get them right before you plant a single seed and your garden will produce more food with
26:11less work in less space than you thought possible.
26:16The honest math is plain.
26:18A family that successfully grows a four-bed raised bed kitchen garden through one full summer
26:25harvests about $600 to $1,000 worth of vegetables.
26:30Tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, herbs, beans, peas, squash, the kind of produce that
26:38runs $4 to $7 per pound at the grocery store.
26:42Set-up cost for the beds, lumber, soil, seeds, mulch, basic tools, about $200 to $400 in year
26:51one and under $50 per year thereafter for ongoing maintenance.
26:58Inside the second year, the garden has paid for itself completely.
27:03Inside the third year, the garden is generating $5 to $10 of food for every $1 spent on it.
27:11That is the return that grocery stores will never tell you about, because nobody at the
27:17grocery store profits from your kitchen garden.
27:22So here is what I want you to do.
27:25This week, walk around your yard with a notebook.
27:28Find the sunniest spot, the place that gets six to eight hours of direct sun.
27:34Mark where the south side of your house, your barn, or your fence falls.
27:40Decide where your one or two raised beds will go.
27:43If you have a smart phone, pull up suncalc.net and check the sun's path across that exact
27:51spot.
27:53This weekend, plan the materials list for one or two beds.
27:57Lumber, screws, soil mix ingredients, seeds or starter plants, drip irrigation kit or watering
28:05can, mulch, labels.
28:08Make the list.
28:10Get the prices.
28:11See if it fits in this year's budget.
28:14Next month, when the soil is warm enough, build one bed first.
28:20Fill it with the proper soil mix.
28:22Plant according to the placement rule.
28:25Tall on the north, short on the south.
28:28Mulch the top.
28:29Set up your watering system.
28:32Label every plant.
28:34Tend that one bed all summer with full attention.
28:39Learn from it.
28:40Tell me in the comments below.
28:42What mistake have you already made in your raised bed garden and what would you do differently
28:47if you started over?
28:49And if you grew up with a parent or grandparent who kept a kitchen garden, share what you remember
28:54about their methods.
28:55The path between the beds.
28:57The way they laid out the rows, the things they did every fall before winter.
29:01The old family methods are exactly the kind of inherited knowledge that gets lost when nobody
29:07writes them down.
29:08I read every single one.
29:11Next time, since today we covered how to build a raised bed garden right, I am going to walk
29:16you through the old way of saving seeds from the best plants in your garden.
29:21The same method the first German immigrants used to bring their seed varieties across the
29:26ocean 300 years ago.
29:28The way to never buy a seed packet again.
29:31Subscribe so you do not miss it.
29:33Until then, find the sunny spot, build one bed, fill it with good soil, water it well,
29:40mulch the top, plant the right things in the right places, label what you put in, and remember
29:46that a garden is not built in a day or in a season.
29:49It is built over years, and every year your soil knows your hands a little better.
29:54That is how the careful old folks fed their families for 300 years on this land.
29:59That is how it is still done, in any garden that remembers.
Comments