If you want beautiful and healthy vegetables, then spring garden bed preparation matters.
This may include double digging, tilling, and mounding. It may involve top dressing and mulching, too.
For some, this can be back-breaking work without the right tools. For others, it’s a nightmare of weeding.
You don’t have to own these tools. Headache-free spring garden preparation is a phone call away.
Preparing Organic Garden Beds for Spring Planting (Source: YouTube)
Depending on whether you are establishing a new garden or refreshing an existing one. There might be light or deep tillage.
Deep tillage or double digging is reserved for newly established gardens. Using regenerative or organic methods, soil biology is critical.
Frequent deep mechanical tillage destroys soil structure. The best tillage is done with plant roots, pigs, or other natural means.
Using a tiller, focus on breaking up only the top few inches. That’s where topsoil exists.
If you are tilling clay, you are destroying the fertility of your garden. The clay will turn into mud or powder. Over time, clay in your garden becomes rock hard.
The right amount of organic matter is necessary to hold moisture and biology that makes nutrients available to your plants.
Some people fertilize before they till. Or they till under organic matter. Both of these methods destroy soil structure and ruin fertility.
Using chemical fertilizers gives you an instant boost of plant growth, yet typically washes away in the first rain.
Worse, chemical fertilizers shock microbes and soil biology, which is necessary to break down organic matter. You end up with weak soil.
Tilling under organic matter pulls nutrients out of the soil. For example, dry matter like wood chips or grasses deep in the soil pull out nitrogen.
When you turn over the soil, it also loses nutrients due to evaporation. Soil biology is destroyed by ultraviolet light from sun exposure.
Yet when you use shallow tillage, you terminate cover crops or kill weeds. The soil structure and deep roots remain.
Of course, after disturbing any soil, you need to cover it back up. Use a top dressing of compost, straw, or leaf mulch. A blanket on the soil protects and feeds soil microbes.
(Available to Martinsville-Henry County, VA) Do you want to have a hassle-free spring garden? Ask us about our spring garden preparation services.
Get the appropriate tillage, compost, and mulching done for you. No need to own a tiller or break your back using one. The right amount of tillage brings your garden to life.
