Join the Debate: Are Logs in Raised Garden Beds a Mistake?

I think that putting logs at the bottom of your raised beds is a terrible idea. This was how I set the Internet on fire about a year ago when I gave my unsolicited opinion about putting logs at the bottom of your raised beds. Hi, I'm Nicole Johnsey Burke. I've been building, installing, designing raised bed kitchen gardens now for almost a decade. I've created over 500 kitchen gardens for my clients and then taught thousands of students how to do it through my book and through my online courses. And I do not think that you should put logs at the bottom of your raised beds. Today I'm going to tell you why that is and some alternatives if you're wanting to fill your beds with something other than great soil. So, first off, I've talked about this in other episodes. If you want to watch my video all about putting mulch in a vegetable garden, you can check out that video right here. So. So mulch is similar with wood and logs. Right. It's just smaller pieces of wood. But I talked about this idea in the mulch video that in my gardens, I only want one main process happening. I only want one thing to be in the midst of a major change in terms of its form. And what I don't want to happen is something in my soil breaking down heavily, decomposing in a quick rate at the same time that my plants are trying to grow and get bigger. Because what happens in that situation is you've got two things pulling simultaneously from the soil medium that both things are trying to live and grow and do their thing in. Right. So that's why I don't like using mulch in a raised bed, because mulch is decomposing and it's pulling nitrogen from the surrounding area as it decomposes at the same time that your plants are trying to grow and get bigger and. And they're pulling nitrogen from the soil. We don't know how long this process is going to take, and we also don't know how it's going to affect the surrounding soil. So these logs could degrade very slowly and have just a slow, continuous pull on the nitrogen from the surrounding soil area. If that's the case, we don't know if we need to amend the soil every day, if we're going to have to be amending the soil weekly, monthly, and if we're going to be amending the soil for years to come because we're going to consistently have that tug and pull on the nitrogen source inside of our soil. So, number one, it's just an unpredictable process. So we don't know the length of time or the amount. We do know for sure it will impact the nitrogen in the soil. The second reason that I stay away from logs in my soil is that it destabilizes my soil. I really want my soil to be finished, to be done creating itself, to be done, decomposing, so that it's now static and can simply sit there and provide this incredible growing medium for my plants that they can rely on day after day after day. So when things are breaking down way under the surface of my soil, when this log is slowly turning into dirt, day after day, all that creates a lot of tumultuous activity. All that is starting to make the soil shift. The soil is going to be slowly going down, but it's also going to be changing its nutrients, it's going to be changing its composition. And that destabilization is not a great place for something to grow in, right? So as these plants are going through all the changes, they're weathering the ups and downs of the rainy days and the drought days and the sunny days and the cold days, and they're trying to become all that they were meant to become. They're trying to go from seed to seed, all the way through the leaves, the stems, the flowers, the fruit. They need to have this steady place to grow in, something that doesn't change where the nutrients are always available. They can always count on the permeability of the soil and the composition of the soil. And so if I've got these logs breaking down consistently day after day in this garden, and it really is not creating that really permanent space for these plants to rely on. In fact, it's destabilizing it for these plants. The last reason is because you're still going to need soil the first day when you do your install and you fill up your bed with all these other natural things, leaves and sticks and things like that, then it's going to feel good that day, because you only use a few bags of soil. You'll only use a little bit of extra soil right at the top. But all those natural elements, they're going to start decomposing the day you put them in there, right? They're going to start breaking down the moment that they go into that bed. And so within a week, within a month, you're going to come back and you're going to have this much space where the soil's already dropped. You come back, you know, six months later, and the soil is going to be dropping by 6 inches or a foot. And so now you're in a situation, right, where you can't add any more of those rough materials because this is your planting area now. Your plants and your seeds have sunk down 6 to 12 inches in the bed. And now you have to ask yourself the question, you know, what do I do? Do I take the plants out, start over? Do I wait till next season? Let's say you wait a whole year, you come back, what are you going to add to the top of that bed? Some more soil. So all the soil that you saved, you know, in the year prior, you're going to have to add it back just a year later. And I found, you know, after installing hundreds of gardens, if I just flip fill it up with soil in the first place. I call this inside of our program Kitchen Garden Academy. I call it worst first. Just put it all in soil first. It really goes down very minimally. Like the most we have to add is an inch or 2 instead of 6 to 12 inches. So I find it's just not worth it. It's totally made the whole process of growing a little bit more unpredictable and made it unstable for the plants. Plus I have to end up buying the soil anyway. So those are the three reasons why I do not recommend using logs at the bottom of your bed. But Nicole, I just don't want to fill it up with soil. I hear you saying. All right, so I'll tell you a couple of alternatives with the caveat that you are still going to have to fill up your beds with soil. But these are the options I would use instead of logs to get a little bit more predictability and hopefully to get the decomposition done faster. So you could fill your bed up with leaves or with straw. These two options are going to be less pulling on the nitrogen from the soil in your garden and you can compact these easier. The other option you can do is build a false bottom. So you, if you've got a two foot tall bed, or if you've got even a, you know, 18 inch bed and you only want to use this much soil, then take some kind of material, your bed material, and build a bottom for it that's higher up so that you're not having to fill the entire bed with soil. Now listen, hugelkultur is a thing. And I can't end this video without addressing this. So I don't at all think that hugelkultur is not a thing or not a worthwhile thing. But my thing is raised beds. My thing is growing in small spaces in a quick amount of time, very efficiently and effectively. And I've just found over the years that that does not work. If you put logs inside your raised beds instead, if you've got to do it, fill it up with lots of leaves, lots of straw, pack it down as tight as possible, use as much good soil as you can possibly afford, and know that if you use natural products that aren't soil at the bottom of your bed this year, you're just going to have to pay for more soil next year. Eventually that's going to degrade and it's going to be time to top your beds off. In general, remember this rule. We only want one organic plant process happening at a time. In general, we want our soil to be stable. We want our soil to already have decomposed already, be at the perfect state to grow our plants. We want it to just be there, full of nutrients, very permeable, and ready to grow our plants. We want the main thing that's growing, that's changing, that's evolving to be our plants. And for that reason, I don't use logs. Tell me what you think about my opinion. If you've had an experience that proves this to be true or proves me wrong, you gotta tell me about it in the comments below. I'd love to learn from you. If you want to learn how to set up your garden the way I do, you can do that with my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. And if you want to learn all about the plants, you got to check out my book, Leaves, Roots and Fruit. And to know when to plant all these things, you got to check out the Gardenary calendar. It's@gardenary.com calendar. You give me two days, I give you all the rest. You can get it for free right below this video or@gardenary.com calendar all right, come back and I'll be here waiting, watching, and I'll have some new ideas and opinions for you next time. See you soon.