In this video, Lindsey takes you inside our 25-foot dome at the Bug Out property. Learn the crucial techniques to create well-aerated, nutrient-rich beds that provide optimal conditions for your plants to flourish!
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Soil
1:57 ITM Trading
2:50 Filling Garden Beds
4:44 Our Soil Mix
7:24 Next Steps
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi everyone, it’s Lindsey. We are inside the 25 foot dome here at the bug Out property, and we are going to start filling our beds with soil. So this is the first time we’re putting soil in our beds. We started this one as a trial to kind of see, so we filled one wheelbarrow with a mix of our compost peat moss and some perlite. This is going to act as the base for our beds. So you can see we filled it about maybe a little bit less than three-fourths of the way. We have our irrigation off to the side while we fill this up and you can see how nice and fluffy it is. So this is really important when we’re thinking about raised beds, especially because even though we have drainage holes built in, we want our roots to be able to aerate through the soil. We want it really nice and fluffy and just loose. We don’t want any compaction, any of those things that’ll make it harder for our roots to grow harder for our water to percolate down to the deeper roots and just harder for our system to be healthy. So, and that’s what the perlite and the peat moss help with. It kind of just helps separate that compost that’s a little bit thicker and it just adds a lot of nice aeration. Also, cocoa core is a great option and vermiculite help as well. So cocoa core vermiculite, peat moss, compost and perlite are all ingredients in the top layer that we’ll be adding. So this is acting as our base and then we’re getting a little bit more technical as we build on our soil. And that’s just because that’s the immediate root zone. That’s where we’ll be planting our seeds. So we just want the most delicate soil on top as possible. But I’m gonna walk you through the steps and then we’ll kind of just show you the process of what we’re gonna do going forward.
With rising inflation bank failures and massive layoffs across multiple sectors, the future of the economy remains uncertain. It’s no wonder the central banks have been getting prepared by stockpiling gold At ITM trading, we have spent over 27 years building a team of seasoned researchers and analysts who can help you prepare for any financial crisis. Our experts are ready to provide you with proven strategies to safeguard your wealth and assets in the event of an economic downturn or a currency reset, which is frankly inevitable. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Schedule your free gold and silver strategy call by clicking on the link in the description below.
So we’re gonna fill all the bases of the beds first and then we have a truckload of the other soil. So we’ll be doing that after we have all this. Have our wheelbarrow here. And it was exactly one wheelbarrow that filled this bed this far. And we have a bin of compost as well as some that we dropped off at an earlier date on the ground here. So we’re just gonna shovel this in and then I’ll just show you the other steps really quick. So I just have this big bag of peat moss, added about a fifth of the bag last time, maybe a fourth, a fifth of the bag. So I’m just kind of doing rough estimates. It’s important to kind of play and experiment with your soil to make sure it’s exactly what you want. But the main thing we’re looking for with this is just nice loose well aerated soil. Do a little bit more. Gonna add some perlite as well. So about half to three quarters of the bag. And then while I have this peat moss right here, I’m just gonna break apart some of these chunks to make it easier to mix in the future. And then I’m gonna add more compost to this and then keep on mixing it. And then we will transfer this to another bed and we’ll keep doing this process until we get all the beds nice and filled. And then we will show you the other soil that we’re using on the top. But for now, this is what we are using as the base for our raised beds in the dome.
Now that we have our soil all mixed up. So we added a decent bit more of compost and a little bit more of the peat moss. I’m mostly just looking for this good mix. I don’t want it to be, you can see the peat moss is a lighter color, so you don’t wanna see chunks of that. You just wanna see nice consistency throughout. I did add a little less perlite this time just because I feel like I used a bit too much on the first one. Not in terms of like it’s gonna do anything bad, just in terms of I did not purchase enough <laugh>. So we are going to roll with this. This will be perfectly fine. Um, if we need to mix in a little bit more, the top layer of soil that we’re gonna be adding has perlite already in it. So if we need to mix it. But honestly, this is looking really good and fine with the new quantity that we did. So now I’m just gonna shovel it in. I would say this is about 70% compost,
15% or maybe more like 18% peat moss, and then about 3% per light. So that’s about the ratio that very roughly think it might be. And then I’m just gonna take the irrigation heads and move them out of the way so we don’t bury them And we’re gonna fill up this bed. So I think we’ll just continue with the one wheelbarrow of mixed ingredients equals the base of each of our beds. And we’ll just keep on going from here. We are now done filling half our beds with our bottom mixture, which was a combination of compost perlite and peat moss. So we filled about three-fourths of the bed full of that. And then the remaining fourth is going to be this soil, which is a combination of compost perlite, peat moss, cocoa core, and vermiculite, and some worm castings. So this is a soil that we bought pre-made just to make it a little bit easier on ourselves, but those are the ingredients. So if you are messing around with making your own soil, those are all great things to add. Or you can do a more basic combination like we did for the bottoms of our beds. But just to give everything a little bit heads of a headstart and the best possible media to grow in. We’re going to be trying this and see how it goes.
So we’re just really easy. Just gonna fill up the rest of these beds all the way to where the liner stops. We’re gonna be finishing off with some pretty wood to make everything a little bit more aesthetic, but for now, we’re just gonna leave enough room that we can cover it and get everything to a depth that is good for planting. So we won’t have to go back, but we have the truck pulled up just right outside. So we’re just gonna be making a few trips back and forth to get this soil unloaded. I think the most important thing when we’re starting seeds, especially with brand new soil like this, so this is very much soil that we haven’t, we haven’t used this type of soil before.
And also this soil hasn’t been in this bed, it hasn’t been in this environment before. So just thinking about that in terms of we have to experiment and we have to learn what our system is giving us. So when we go to plant seeds in this, I think it’s really important that we start out with the basics. Just watering, making sure everything looks good, our transplants that we’re gonna do today, we’re gonna give them a little bit of worm castings, but that’s a very neutral thing to add. We’re not gonna do any heavy fertilizing or anything like that right now just because we don’t wanna put our transplants into any more shock. We just kind of want to ease them into their environment. But when we’re growing seeds, things we can look for, um, damping off means that your seeds are getting too much water and that is, you’ll see on their stem, it’s starts to get spindly looking. A lot of times the leaves are yellow signs like that. Like we always want green, healthy looking seedlings. So it looks like a wheelbarrow is almost gonna get us all the way full. So we were being a bit more optimistic about how much a wheelbarrow would do. Yes, I certainly was <laugh>. But we’ll continue to fill this and then we’ll show you once they’re all done. And then the next step is planting, which is super exciting. Yay.
