Soil conditioning

Soil conditioning is highly dependent on the size of your garden. So before we get into what’s important, make sure you have an idea of ​​how big your garden will be. If you are doing a relatively small garden (4x4ft – 10x10ft), you won’t have to worry about drainage or removing the soil every season. For example, if you are making a raised bed garden, you won’t have to grow grass in your garden to do so, you can simply build the bed and fill it with soil and compost. Compost is an excellent medium for plants to grow and requires no additional work to obtain excellent results, plus it will drain well on its own.

With larger gardens (10 x 20 feet – 1 acre or more), the ability to compost them becomes very expensive, time consuming, and you can still have flooding that will kill your plants. With a larger garden, the first step is to till the lawn or soil. The soil must be broken, once it is broken, it can be planted. Many people use a cultivator or disc to break up the soil, but depending on the size, you can easily rent equipment or invest in the purchase of some equipment to prepare the soil each year. Once you’ve stirred the soil a bit and broken it down into small chunks smaller than your fist and at least 5 inches deep, you need to focus on preparing for drainage. Take a step back and look for low spots in the landscape and dig a small trench or buy a drain pipe to lay in the ground before putting all the plants in the ground. This is a CRITICAL step, do not overlook or ignore it, a heavy rain could kill half your garden in a matter of a day or two and there will be nothing you can do (yes, it happened to me). Since the soil is tilled and loose, it is very easy to dig a drainage ditch or lay plastic pipes. Depending on the size, you may only need a shovel and a couple of hours or you may need heavy equipment to dig the trench.

As I said before, planning all of this can make the difference between success or failure. By taking a few hours to step back, look at what you want to do and where, and then see it first, there is a powerful way to be successful the first time instead of undergoing trial and error.