Prepare Soil for a Garden
You’ve decided to start a vegetable garden. As much as you’d love to just start planting, there are several things you need to do first. Preparing the soil for a vegetable garden is an important step to ensure you grow the best plants and produce.
Cultivate your soil
You need to start out by cultivating your soil. To cultivate your soil means to break it up and prepare it for gardening. Unless you already have a garden, you will probably need to plot out your garden, and break up the grass. First decide how bug you want your garden to be and then find a place to put it. Put it where it will get plenty of sun and is out of the shade.
Next, plot out the space and start cut the grass. Use a tape measurer of necessary to make the edges of the garden straight and make it the right dimensions. Once you’ve cut it, remove all the grass and top layer. If you have a tiller, you can leave it there. The tiller will break it up really well and put the grass back into the soil for added nutrients.
If you don’t have a tiller and feel like you can’t break it up sufficiently, add it to your compose pile. Once it is broken up naturally, you can use it later on as soil.
Continue breaking up your soil as deep as possible. Break up all the clumps and remove all the rocks. You should be able to run a garden cultivator through the soil without catching too many rocks and grabbing hold of roots.
Fertilize your soil
Fertilizing is a very important step of preparing a garden. Without the proper nutrients, your garden will not thrive. You can start by adding any compost you have. This includes the fresh soil from leaves, dead plants, eggshells, and other kitchen products that you’ve thrown away and let sit and break down.
Next, if you feel you need it, you can add a fertilizer. I suggest 10 lb. Osmocote Vegetable Plant Food because it is made especially for vegetable gardens.
Test your Soil
It is possible to over-fertilize your garden. If you have too many nutrients, your garden will not grow right. By using a soil tester, you can find out how much of which nutrients are in your soil. You will find out what you need more of and what you can cool down on.
Once your garden spot is cultivated and fertilized, you can start planting!