Expanding Your Garden Bed – Easy Growing Episode #1

As our garden grows, often times our growing aspirations do as well. If you grow with us, you know that our garden beds are all modular, which means they’re also expandable. When we talk about that feature at Farmers Markets or with you online the concept isn’t always immediately clear. However, when shown visually it makes it much easier to understand. So we’re discussing that! How to make your raised garden bed, grow with your expanding gardening aspirations.

Video Transcription – Intro

Hi everyone, I’m Bryan Traficante from GardenInMinutes, and today we’re excited to announce that we’re starting off our first video series. We’re calling it ‘Easy Growing’. The idea behind it is to really build on the value, the thesis, of GardenInMinutes, which is making it easier and faster for you to start and grow a garden!
So we’ll be talking about different topics such as plant spacing, garden design, different planting tips…and really what I’m most excited about are your questions. We want to take your questions, help you answer them and provide additional insight and value.

1. Expandable Gardens – What does that mean?

One of the questions, to I guess kick the show off is… I get a question often about, “What do we mean by expanding a garden…what does it mean that our gardens are expandable” … and really that stems from the design of our garden beds, where everything is modular. There are no tools, there are no nails or screws or things like that. We make it all so that it slides together by hand and so on.

Because of that, we’re able to expand our garden beds to larger sizes and different layouts; which for you means that if you want to grow a larger garden over time, it’s really really easy. You don’t have to unscrew anything, you don’t have to take nails out, you don’t have to add four additional boards to make a full square garden bed. With ours… shamelessly plugging ourselves, we simply pull the pins out, add additional boards, and your garden gets larger.
It’s a lot easier for me to show that visually, so I’m out here in our garden and I’m going to be showing you exactly how to expand one of our garden beds, so that way if you want to grow a larger garden, it’s a lot easier! So here we go.

2. Pull out Connecting Pins and Remove an End Board

Alright, so we’re over by our garden bed and here is how you get started. You’ll take notice that our garden beds all have connecting pins, right here and over here.

And what we want to do is take this garden bed, which we’re obviously not growing anything in right now, and expand it to a larger size. So I have our three foot expansion boards here and what we’re going to do is extend this garden bed out three additional feet.   (Note: You can still expand your garden while growing plants).

So to get started. If you have your garden bed, you simply pull the connecting pins out of the garden… and I’ll be honest with you I loosened these up a little bit. Sometimes they’re really easy to get out by hand, sometimes you need a little additional force to get them out. The wood is going to expand and contract. It’s just what’s going to happen with humidity, rain, being dry outside, different environments that you’re in. But the idea basically is, you pull these pins out; that’s one and that’s two, and now your end board is loose! You’ll notice that we do have soil in here, some of the soil is going to fall a little bit, and that’s okay.

But what you do is, after taking the pins out, you very carefully remove your end board, lift it up, and move it over, placing it down on the side there like that.

3. Slide Your Expansion Boards into the Open Ends of Your Garden Bed and Add the End Board

Next what we’re going to do is grab our expansion boards, add them to the open end of our garden bed just like that. It’s hard to do with one hand (laughing) Then we’re going to grab our other expansion board, add it into the other open end… get it in there, there you go!
Then you take the end board that you just took off of your existing garden and slide that in. It’s easier to do when you have two hands and you’re not holding a camera (laughing). Then go over to the other side, slide that together and you’ve now expanded your garden bed an additional three feet. What you’ll do is go ahead and fill that with soil, plants, of course add your connecting pins back into your end boards here, so that way everything goes together nice and tight. Do that for all of the sides and now you can grow now even more plants, more vegetables, and it took you just a couple of minutes.

4. Add Your Questions and Interests

Alright, so I hope you all enjoyed the first episode of ‘Easy Growing’! PLEASE, leave your comments and your questions. We really really want to be able to interact with everyone on here and answer different questions and make videos about the different things you’re curious about. So if you’re watching Facebook, on YouTube, or you’re getting this in your e-mail, please let us know what you think. Let us know what you’re curious about learning.

If you don’t want to post on social media. I’ll give you this. Go ahead and email me directly. My name is Bryan Traficante. My email is Bryan@GardenInMinutes.com. I’ll post it in the details below. And on that, I hope you’ll have a wonderful day!