We Built Raised Garden Beds for Free!! – First stage of our Portugal farm veggie garden!

It’s a big week on our homestead as we get prepared for the Spring! We finally put to use all the old materials we’ve been collecting to build raised garden beds, which we then begin filling. We also had the joy of jarring olives from our very own trees!

Thanks so much for being a part of our journey! See you soon
Dani, Will & Bailey xx

Hey guys so plan for today both will and I are getting some materials ready to for our garden beds we plan to make a start on building our garden beds tomorrow so today we’re just getting some things together I am sorting some wood for the coast and as you can probably hear will

Is cutting some metal for the side I’m going to be using some of this wood which came from the kitchen roof so the estimate will be six post start a bed there we go there’s the one bed here we go it’s all the wooden posts that were

Left over from the kitchen roof well all the ones that weren’t rotted through oh this is the last Animal House that I had taken D and here is a pile of the metal which we are going to use this will be the next pile which I cut

Up we also have the roof of this little animal house and that Animal House and the whole roof of this building the walls and possibly doors of this building here and then there’s another building so there’s still plenty of metal left should we need it here we have quite a few

Sheets of the old roof from the first animal hose that we took down what I’ve done is just cut them directly in half and that will be the rough height of our raised garden beds w it’s garden bed time got a bed we spent a bit of time this morning

Marking out where they’re going to be make it easier geni this idea another one of my husband’s great ideas yep we down this side we’re going to have seven beds all in a row all similar size and spaced out to have a good pathway and around

Each one so we can work at them easily yes with plenty of space so we’re making sure that we leave enough room in between them they don’t need to be perfectly even or anything like that but why not tryne it a little bit even yeah but it doesn’t need to be perfect

Obviously it doesn’t so this morning we put the four corner Post in and have put a string around them just to keep them all relatively in line and now we’re going to start putting all the amp posts in along the string line both on both sides and then there’ll be a middle post

For each bed so each bed will have six supporting posts we’ll then be able to screw the metal on right R and then we can CHP the the wood level with the metal anyway he’s done a good job really good job they’re all looking pretty good I think still have ref finishing pieces

Like these two to go on to the rest of them they’ll clamp the metal in plus protect dust from the sharp edges but I need more parts for that but that’s and ready to F be strong enough without the wood on would you like to try on

Olive I haven’t tried them yet so we’ll have to see give it a go here we go not bad salty but they’ve been in salt water salty I think they’re probably ready to jar I think so these are all the darker colored olives which we’ve taste tested and seem

To be cured enough no bitterness in them and we’ve also got another batch of green olives which we’re going to leave for a bit longer they take a bit longer they’ll take a little bit longer to cure and then these ones we going to get Jarred up and let the flavors Infuse

For a week or so and then taste test again tast enjoy hopefully we lots of olives and if we were on our trip Lots so what I’m going to do now is these were our Perry Perry chili plants which are well and truly DED off but we just left the

Chilies on them to dry and they’ve all shriveled up uh so I’m just going to cleck them bend them up and then we’ll have some PR prry chili flakes we did do a batch of these the end of the summer of chili flakes from these PR Parry plants and they were hot

Man mega hot so we’re pretty excited about this these are of course olives from our own trees here on our own land and they don’t taste disgusting at the moment so we’re going to Bry them in a mix of this is water vinegar and salt and this time I’ve used apple cider

Vinegar next time for the green olives I might try white wine vinegar so we’re just going to experiment with different flavors and see what we like the P off best but we know the olives are good so that’s a good start the jars have been sterilized with

Hot water we just get you through the jars yep use that for your hands I’m just dissolving the salt in The Jug here with the vinegar and water our Oles in try them all up might need take a little bit more solution so we have some SED and some lemon from the garden

Some which we’re going to put in one of the jars we’re going to have a sage lemon and a little bit of garlic trying to use what we’ve got growing um and hopefully next year when we do this again we’ll have a much greater selection of herbs to pick from

And then in this little Ram for one of the jars is garlic and chili because we like spice so I’m going to go ahead and put the siege leaves garlic clo Le SES here put that one in there like f up on this mixture just need to pick

Up some more mixture and then olive oil or anything supp sh and then we glog of olive oil on the top there looks great smells really nice looking good even smelling good it’s the garlic beautiful so we will give these about a week to let the flavors anduse and then

We can enjoy olives yeah looking forward to the trying now but they were nice by themselves but they only be nicer with some flavors yeah today we’re making a start on filling some of the garden beds that we’ve made so the first layer is going to be cardboard uh we’ve been saving

Cardboard basically since we’ve arrived here everything yeah we’ve got these big boxes which were from our solar panels which are a really good size which will definitely get us a good start on lining the bottom of the bed but for now we’re just doing the really exciting job of

Removing all the tape from the cardboard don’t want plastic in our garden beds for obvious reasons got easier way doing it doesn’t work as you can see from up here we have now lay a layer of cardboard at the base of each of the garden beds really nice day

Today next step is to get some wood some logs for the bottom of them to go on top of the cardboard up here there are quite a few rotten logs here and here as well also some here which will Makey juice for the garden bed will has a little

Fire going on up here to burn some of the gors and broom that we’ve cleared from around the driveway we want to keep the driveway nice and open and just trying to get on top of all our clearing w while it’s winter for is bu one wheelbarrow fill filled half a

Bed so this could be a long process just because of the size of her beds for unfortunately the weather just isn’t as good today as it was yesterday to say the least yesterday with 21° and sun today it’s been pouring rain all day but still making progress with the garden beds

So at this Fage we have branches some rotten logs in all of the seven beds so far next step is adding some organic material so what we’ve got is mixture of leaves and twigs that kind of thing we’ll show you where we’re getting that from it seems like we’ve

Got an endless supply which is really good cuz we have a lot of bands to fill in in right like up we’re just in this field here which the whole right hand side this whole bank here was completely covered in brambles before you couldn’t access it at all but

Just before Christmas we cleared all but leaving some of the oak trees freed and beneath all that there has been lots of decaying leaves and twigs and all that good stuff so we’ve ried back this little area here and you can just see the beautiful soil underneath very good

Joy and all the leaves here will be perfect for helping f up our garden beds quick and easy way to do it so that’s us done with our garden bed so far total cost is Z you CED it up there it up zero Z Point Z zero P free garden beds

We’ve made seven so far we plan to make 14 it’s quite labor intensive and it’s quite a big area and they quite big beds but pretty exciting very exciting be very good once they’re all ready to plant our seedlings into yeah we’re going to have so much food so far they’ve been filled

With tree logs and branches we’ve put started putting leaves in the first one the next thing will be compost and top soil and then they’ll be ready to plant in we must say it feels really good reusing all the materials so the metal came from the animal houses Old animal

Houses the wood came from our old kitchen roof and a lot of the the logs at the bottom were just around the land roding and everything else it’s just it’s all here so it’s kind of it’s great it feels like you’re clearing one area and filling another area so it’s like

Getting two jobs done at once very good good very good feeling so join us next week see hopefully the finished first seven garden beds and um thanks for watching um please subscribe if you haven’t already it’s free and yeah we’ll see you soon bye have a great week