- What do you do if you've got a raised bed
and you have gophers, deer, voles, birds,
whatever the case may be,
how do you actually protect your raised bed?
Well, in this video,
we're gonna show you our ultimate solution
for protecting a raised bed from every single type of pest.
So the first thing you want to do
is really it's about placement initially.
I know that this particular area has some gophers.
- Oh yeah.
- I know we've got raccoons that come through,
skunks and opossums, let alone, you know,
your birds and all your other pests.
So if you can, you just wanna avoid that, but we can't here.
I need to put asparagus in.
This is the area that we've chosen.
And so the first thing you wanna do is just prep the land.
So I have the bed laid out here.
This is actually a combined version
of our Birdies 8-in-1 bed.
We put two together and put some bracing kits on.
Cool little system.
But the first thing we wanna do Jacques,
is just move this outta the way.
- Yeah.
- Level the soil.
And then we'll get to our triple threat bottom prep.
We'll just pop it down here real quick.
- I'm gonna dig out a little bit
of this bermuda that I see on the edges.
- Yeah.
It's a good time as you're leveling,
to just take the weeds out that you do see,
especially something like a bermudagrass,
which can be pretty gnarly.
We're gonna protect from it, but why not remove it
if you're leveling the soil out anyways?
- And I like using the back of my rake a lot of times
for stuff like this, it's pretty nice.
- I think this is an underrated part of bed setup
because the aesthetics do, to me,
matter a lot in the garden.
And if something's nice and level, it just really helps
with the whole look and feel of your garden.
We think it's level, we're gonna do a quick test fit
and then we'll just adjust from there with a level.
Yeah.
We're a little off right now,
but it's okay because we need to lay down
the first part of the triple threat bottom prep,
which is going to be the landscape fabric.
Part one is gonna be something very classic
in the garden that we typically don't use a lot of.
- Right.
- But, it certainly can help,
especially you have a really gnarly weed,
so that's just landscape fabric.
So what we're gonna do is I'll have Jacques
grab one side of it here.
We'll just roll it out like this across our whole bed area.
And we'll actually go a little bit further,
just to make sure that we have good overlapping.
I'll come all the way out.
I'm actually gonna grab a stake Jacques and-
- Yeah, I'll get this corner.
- Stake down the corners before I cut it.
And then when you put down your next roll,
you don't match it up perfectly with the edge.
You overlap it by at least six inches or so.
So we'll come in and just map that to about there.
Let's bring it over just a little more Jacques.
- Okay.
- Right about there looks good.
And what I'm gonna do now is pin down just a little bit
in the middle here.
You wanna toss that one there? Yeah, perfect.
Great.
And for good measure, 'cause we're not sure
if this is exactly the size of the bed,
we'll just do one more layer right over here.
Yeah. We can do a pretty aggressive overlap here.
- Yeah. That's probably good.
Oh awesome.
- Pretty much right exactly what we needed.
Our landscape layer is down.
Next up, is what's called hardware cloth.
It is not a cloth at all.
It's actually a metal mesh.
This is half inch hardware cloth.
Don't know why it's named that.
It's actually very misleading.
But what we want to do
is basically the same exact process,
cutting and overlapping.
And we're using the Felco CP clippers.
You can just use any sort of tin snip as well,
but this one's great 'cause it makes its way
through some plant material,
but also it'll destroy this hardware cloth.
So let's unwrap this and get this going.
Our hardware cloth is down.
That is gonna be preventing pretty much all
of your digging pests.
Now, this is not a stainless steel hardware cloth.
You could certainly go that route.
And in fact, we probably want to develop something
like that at Epic Gardening,
because galvanized is strong and it's gonna last for years.
- Yeah.
- But eventually it probably will rust out
and maybe then you'll have some digging issues,
but this is gonna prevent your gophers, your voles,
your moles for many, many years.
The final step in the triple threat bottom prep
is just cardboard.
So I have some ram board here actually left over
from an old project.
Jacques, we've got, I think a old cardboard frame box
or something like that.
It doesn't really matter.
The whole point here is just one final layer
of protection that is pretty much free.
So let's just do the same exact process.
- Cool.
- This one, we're not going to stake down.
We're just going to lay flat and then place it on the bed.
Only thing left to do now is to place the bed.
And if it's not level,
we can always shore it up with a little soil on top.
Our bed's in place.
There's one quick note I wanna make.
If you're working with a wooden bed,
especially for the landscape fabric and the hardware cloth,
a good idea is to flip your bed upside down
and actually just staple it directly to the bottom,
which we did with our herb bed over there.
But since this is a metal bed,
you just overlap slightly
and you can cover the rest with mulch.
Now, we've protected the bottom.
We need to protect the top from,
for us, things like cabbage moths.
But certainly if you're in an area with deer
or with other flying pests, then here's what we're gonna do.
We have some conduit,
this is three quarter inch electrical conduit,
which you can get pretty much anywhere
in the world where you are.
And then Jacques got a special little box here, of?
- This is a conduit maker pipe kit.
So the idea of this is that you could build
whatever structure you want
with these fittings that are in the box.
- Yeah.
So what we're gonna do now is, because again,
it's a metal bed.
You can do this with a wood bed too,
but specifically with these Birdies,
you can actually screw it directly to the bolts.
So we're gonna undo some of these bolts.
We'll start cutting this up
and show you exactly how we do it.
So the first thing I'm gonna do is remove the first
and probably fourth bolt.
- Okay.
- Just to get a little bit of leverage there,
make sure that we're not doing anything too crazy.
- For the height of the conduit,
are we thinking like five feet?
- I think about five feet up.
- Okay.
- So however low we go, plus five feet on top of that.
Right?
So we'll go about here and then we'll go up a little bit.
- Okay. - Yeah.
- I see.
- If you have filled the bed up
and you're sort of retrofitting,
you can actually just dig down
and install it this way,
but the beauty of the maker pipe kit
and the conduit sort of set up
is you could even just build it outside your bed,
use some rebar to stake it into the ground.
- Yeah.
- And you could make, perhaps a shade cloth.
I mean the flexibility of a kit like this
is really second to none.
- Yeah.
I mean, there's so many different ways
you could approach it.
Like up front, we actually have it on rebar,
outside the bed.
- Looks like Bobca wants to watch you Jacques.
Bobca is not a pest, but she'll be out of this bed as well.
- There it is.
- Perfect. It's just that easy.
So while you're cutting, Jacques,
I am going to go ahead and install.
- Perfect.
- So the way that the beds go together
in this particular case is just a bolt and a nut, right?
So all we're gonna do, is on the interior,
we're in a sandwich one of these right here,
and then we're gonna put the nut on.
So it's actually quite simple.
You just wanna make sure
that you decide which way you want it to be
and map that on every single one.
I'm just gonna loose fit it, then I'll put my conduit in.
And I'm mapping the bottom edge directly
to the bottom of that last one there.
- [Jacques] Gotcha.
- So I'm getting all the height out of it I can.
So we have our uprights done,
but now we need to create the frame
and there's a kind of a clever little way to do it.
- Yeah.
So these little corner pieces here,
the way this works is that there's an outer part
and the inner part in two bolts.
And so what happens is you could slip this on
over the top of your edge pieces
and I just have it on loose,
so that I could kind of visualize how I'm gonna set this up.
So that creates a perfect 90 degree angle.
So we could take this piece
and I'll tie in this more as we do it.
But basically, this will sit in here, it'll tighten on.
- Yep.
- And then we can put another piece there, cut it,
and we'll have a nice rigid frame.
- Yep.
And then if we wanted to, we could even split it in half
and throw another line crossbeam down this way,
if you wanted to.
There's all sorts of different connectors.
You can actually use this as a string trellis.
In fact, Jacques, your garden.
- Yep.
- You've done this, but you could cover.
But instead, you decided to use more of a string trellis
and then another trellis on the other side.
- You could even do both.
- You could do both. Yeah.
So it's very flexible. It's very cool.
But for the purposes of pest removal,
you'll see what we're building here
is the ability to block off the top of the bed.
- Exactly.
- Let's get all these fixtures in place and get onto it.
- Instead of measuring this to the exact right dimension,
it's easier to just put it in one side
and then we're gonna come in with a marker,
and what you wanna do is you wanna get on the other,
the inside of where that bolt is.
So it doesn't have to be exact,
'cause there's quite a lot of space inside there.
So I'm gonna go in right there.
I don't know if that marked, that felt like it marked.
And then I'll go ahead and cut that to size.
- The only thing left to do is just put the crossbeams in.
We're gonna do these at 49 inches,
but of course, when you're designing the system,
whatever bed you are doing,
the depth of that is pretty much
what you want to cut those to.
- Yep.
- So the basic frame is done.
And as we fill this bed up with soil,
Jacques and I are gonna talk about
the about three or four different toppings
you can add to the system.
It really depends on the type of pest
that you're dealing with.
So for us, what we really want to think about
is if you've got birds,
then bird netting might be a good option.
If you have flying pests, plus you have a heat problem,
then shade cloth is gonna be a good option.
If you have frost as an issue,
you can go with frost cover,
'cause frost cover is going to prevent
all your flying insects as well.
The only thing I would caution against
is if you do something like a bird netting,
you end up running into this issue
where smaller insects can get through
and if it's not really far away from your plants,
even birds can land and kind of get in.
And so I think I would typically recommend a shade cloth
or a frost cover.
- Yeah.
- One or the other is gonna be your best bet.
- They give you some good ventilation too.
I mean, if you wanna get, if you have things like rats
and it's a serious battle,
then you could also consider putting hardware cloth
around this.
You could do that using either clips
or just zip ties or wire.
- So as we fill this up,
I'm gonna show you how we did it out in the front yard
with our San Juan cabbage, Toronto giant cabbage.
But this is the way to pretty much prevent any pest
from getting into your garden.
Remember, we triple lined the bottom
and then we've created a frame on the top.
So you can basically prevent whatever you want,
even deer, so long as you're using a good enough cover here.
So as we fill this bed up, hopefully this was helpful.
Let us know what you wanna see next down in the comments.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.