Hey, what's up everyone. Kevin here from Epic Gardening, and we're back with a solo episode.

You guys have just me to listen to on the podcast.

Okay, so today's question comes from Instagram.

It's from Little Miss Breeze on Instagram.

So she's saying, how can I minimize the cost

of a raised bed soil mixture?

Now, this is one question that I've asked myself many times and also I get it quite

often just because you know let's say this is your first year gardening you're putting

in a couple new raised beds and you look up the bagged soil mix prices and your eyes sort of roll out of your head because not only did you just spend some money building that bed and probably some other money on incidental, you know, gadgets and gear for the garden,

but now you have to pay for the soil.

So we're going to go over a couple different ways that you can minimize this cost and, you know,

depending on your level of resourcefulness your

creativity or even the local resources around your area you can even get this

cost to pretty close to zero. So first of all we do kind of want to talk about what a soil mixture in a raised bed

should look like from a texture and quality perspective and I'll run over this quickly

because I have talked about it before on the podcast.

So first, you want to balance nutrition, aeration,

and water retention.

So the roots need oxygen, but the roots also need water,

and the roots also need nutrition. They need to be able to correctly uptake the food

that they need to grow nice and big so that you can eat those plants as food, right?

So one thing that I will say is you can get away with up to about 50% of your

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