How To Prepare A New Garden Bed
Ready to dig in and start gardening? Follow these beginner gardening tips for How To Prepare A New Garden Bed. Learn how to grow the best garden on the block.
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Starting your first garden can be a little confusing. While most people seem to prefer building above-ground garden beds this is not always an option for everyone. The cost of raised garden needs and the requirement of finding soil to fill them can be a major deterrent. But the good news is that you can do an old-fashioned in-ground garden bed.
How To Prepare A New Garden Bed
When prepping an in-ground garden bed, moving it is not an option like with potted or more portable above-ground garden options. This means you need to decide where to place your garden before you begin to dig. Consider what you plan on planting. Most vegetable garden beds will need to be placed in full sun. Some leafy greens can grow well in shady areas allowing you to take advantage of more of your yard.
Mark off the area you plan to dig so you can stay within the marks. This will make your garden bed look more even and make planning your garden bed easier.
Dig up the top layer to remove the grass. Grass can be a difficult ground cover to remove quickly for growing food but you can make quick work of it with a large shovel. Shake out the grass in an effort to remove excess soil that you use in your garden. At this point remove the roots to any weeds in your garden. This will prevent them from sprouting back up for you to weed later.
If you have a tiller you can till the soil the easy way but you can dig and till up a garden bed with some elbow grease and a shovel. A cultivator or garden hoe can make for less work when hand tilling your new in ground garden bed. Tillin is the perfect time to add soil amendments. Remove rocks as you till.
Soil amendments are easy to add to your would to improve the quality of even the worst nutrition issues in the ground soil. Quality compost, eggshells, old dried mulch or fall leaves all make great actions to your garden soil that can be tilled in during this process.
Adding amendments to your in-ground garden soil is vital if you do not have very fertile soil to give your garden the best chance. If your soil doesn’t grow grass and weeds well before you decide to dig it up, check the PH level of the soil and adjust the PH with amendments.
After your soil is ready add some definition to your garden bed to help slow weeds slipping back in. This can be as simple as some cheap garden edging or make use of rocks or bricks you have available to you.
After you have planted your garden bed you want to prepare it for the summer. Add plenty of mulch to your garden bed to prevent the soil from drying out in the summer sun. Mulching also helps to reduce how much weeding you need to do to keep your garden healthy. You can add a layer of cardboard or grass clippings under more decorative mulch over top to lower the cost.
Check out these Gardening Tips
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Free Vegetable Gardening Guide
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