Description

Eric answers viewer mail about raised beds and talks about smoking food. Visit our community site for more info http://gardenfork.tv Distributed by Tubemogul.

Transcript

Garendfork Viewer Mail: Raised Beds Eric: Come here guys! They found the Frisbee. So we have been getting some viewer mail. And our friend, Kurt from the Carolina’s was asking about raised beds. And I have gotten more than one question about this. As you can tell, we still have a ton of snow here and our raised beds are still buried but I wanted to answer some stuff. I do not think you should use treated lumber because it has been shown that the treatment to keep it from rotting can leach into the soil and then maybe leach into your plants. What I did, was I just took 2x12s. You can take it 2x14 or whatever you can buy. And I coated them with linseed oil. I coated them a couple of times. I put them on sulfur (Inaudible) and then I built them. I used the little angle brackets that you use for putting together roof trellises. You can buy them at the big home improvement stores. And then my beds are 12 feet by four feet wide. You can also make raised beds. You do not need to use wood to do it. You can just mound up a bunch of soil. I have seen just kind of like mounded raised beds. What I like about a raised bed like this, it has basically a little---it is almost like a bench. Female: Go ahead (Inaudible). Eric: What I like is that when the soil, when the snow is in here, it is a nice place to sit on the edge because I have ruptured disc on my back. So it makes a lot easier instead of having to bend down on the ground to work on the plants. You can just sit right on the edge of it. It also makes it really easy to mow the loan. If you are putting raised beds together, make sure that they are at least the width of your lawn mower. We learned that. And also raised beds warm up faster in the spring because the soil is raised up a little higher than the soil around when the sun hits it. So, that is our answer to our viewer mail for today. But send us more questions and go to gardenfork.tv, and check out the website. There is an episode, blog on there. There is a little button there that gives you more information about each episode and tell your friends about the show. I would really, really appreciate that. Just too kind of get the word out. If you think of someone that might like the show, send him the link to the show, and if they like dogs or gardening, or horses, there is something for everyone to like. Female: He does not drop it. Eric: Right! Bring it here! Female: What are you doing? You are working? What are you doing? Eric: I have sugar snap peas from FedCo. and it says sow as early as ground can be worked. Female: Look at the ground. Eric: Yes, but this ground it is a raised bed. It warms up faster than the surrounding soil so I am putting in some sugar snap piece. Yes, it is the end of March here. So, I am just going to throw them in, and see what happens. Female: Are you going to have to put some twine or something on the trellises so it can grow up in it? Eric: Yes ideally your trellises have a horizontal post so it can climb up instead of the vertical post but from my decorative standpoint obviously these look better. You know who built them. But sugar snap peas, they will grow. They get kind of tall and you just let them latch on here, and they will go up. So that is what we are doing today in the late winter. Female: It is spring. It is technically spring. Eric: It is technically spring. Okay. So my neighbors gave me this smoker. This is an electric smoker. They used it once and they never used it again. I said the day that I wanted to learn more about like smoking foods and stuff. And I talked about making a smoker out of like a galvanize garbage can, they said we will just give you this one. So, we are going to have fun with this. I have never smoked food before. The irony is like five years ago, my friend Ran, tried to give me a smoker and I was like I have no desire to have a smoker. Then all of a sudden now, we learned about barbecue and all that kind of thing, I want to try my hand at smoking different things. So we are going to see how this thing works out, all right. So we have a couple of epis