Prepping your soil for a garden.

When we first bought our house I was so excited to have a place to put a nice big vegetable garden. My grandmother has been known to have beautiful gardens that yield up far more than even pictured here below on her giant family table.

But somewhere along the journey of three pregnancies, births, months of breastfeeding, and everything else that life threw at us in between the garden fell to the wayside. The back corner of our yard became a favorite place for weeds and broken children’s toys somehow always got blown there in the wind.

Until this year…this is the year I start working on getting my garden area into shape. My youngest is turning two this summer and even though my children still keep me busy I am finding more and more time to add things to my days. So I’m going to share how I got my neglected garden soil ready to be planted this spring.

First things first I had to pull all the weeds. I pulled all the weeds by hand because I didn’t want to poison my garden soil and burned soil sometimes takes time to let things grow again. After the weeds were pulled, I raked all the dead twigs from weeds in past years and rocks and whatever else had made its way into my dirt into piles and then picked them up and loaded them in a wheelbarrow to be taken out of the yard.

Once the dirt was all cleaned up I went to our family friends that own a bait and tackle business, they sell worms for fishing purposes and therefore end up with more worm castings than one would ever need. I grabbed my shovel and gathered a bunch. If you are not lucky enough to have such a connection you can look into buying worm castings or other types of soil additives from your local nurseries. Compost is amazing if you have access to it as well! I then spread the castings all over the soil I planned to plant into. I also threw some into all my raised beds as well.

Once you’ve added a good amount of nutrients into your soil it’s time to add water! Add water to keep dust down on the next steps and moisture for when it’s time to plant as well!

Next you’ll want to use a rototiller of some sort to break up any hard patches of dirt, turn your soil, and mix in new nutrients. We use an attachment on a weed eater but maybe someday we will buy a nicer one. You can also rent them if you want.

You can see the patch in the upper right has been rototilled. I also turned the soil in my raised beds.

Once we were done rototilling everything, I used my hands to level out all my raised beds a little, but you could use a rake or something if you’d like, then I watered all my soil again. For the soil I did in ground I didn’t see a need to re-level it, just gave it some water. The next thing I do is make rows in the dirt using a garden hoe like this one AMES 2825700 Welded Garden Hoe

I just drag it through the dirt until I have nice little rows that I think I can get water to flow through from one end to the other. I like to space my rows roughly 3 feet apart but I do not measure or make perfectly straight rows. If you want instructions on how to make perfectly straight rows reach out though and I can help you! Once I have my rows roughed out I start putting water into them on one end and watching it to make sure it will flow clear to the opposite end nicely.

With your garden hoe in hand, watch and follow the water making sure to widen any pinch points in your row, and clear out any large clumps of dirt or rocks. Below on the left you can see a small pinch point and on right the spot after I cleared it.

You will also need to reinforce walls that look like they are too low or might start leaking water out the side of your row as shown below.

Continue repeating these steps until you have finished all of your rows. Now when you are ready to plant keep in mind that planting right in the middle of your row might seem like the thing to do but DO NOT plant directly in the middle of your rows. Choose one side and plant all your plants along that side as shown below. The reason being that if you plant directly into the middle of your rows your plants will restrict water flow once they start to grow and then it will take much longer to water. Planting to the side fixes that problem and also makes sure that the soil your plant lives in wont get eroded away with each watering. Your plants roots will get plenty of water all while keeping leaves etc. clean and dry.

Well, that’s it! That’s how I prepare my soil for gardening in the spring. I hope this post was helpful to you in some way, and I look forward to sharing many more insights from my garden in the coming months so stay tuned!

Update: The garden is coming along great, I have noticed a big difference in the growth this year compared to the first year in our house before adding soil amendments. See more recent photo below!