Making a Garden II

Making a Garden II
By Simon Morris

Part one of this two part series covered how to plan your garden to ensure it would receive maximum sunlight. This article will cover how to prepare the soil for the garden.

Depending on what size garden your landscaping plans call for will depend on how you plant the garden. If you want a large area devoted to a garden the ground should be ploughed and the sod turned under. However, if you want a small garden to add to your landscaping, you would want to plough and remove the sod. The best way to remove the sod is to stake off the garden spot and tie rope to the stakes. By doing this, you will have an accurate and straight line to follow. Use a spade to dig into the edges along the line. The smaller the area, the easier this task will be. Once you edge your stake line with the spade, the sod will be easy to remove. Once you have the edging done, you can roll it up just as you would a carpet and remove it.

If you have a larger garden, then you will have to remove the sod in sections, you can use sections a foot wide. Then you can roll these sections up like a rug. The mistake most people make when dealing with the sod from their garden is they get rid of it. The sod has a lot of rich nutrients your future garden could use. What you want to do is pack the sod, grass side down. Then let nature take its course, and let it decompose. Once it is decomposed, it makes an excellent fertilizer. This is the easiest way to make a compost pile. When tending to your landscaping, you should do this with any organic matter. For example, instead of bagging your grass clippings and getting rid of them, use them to make a compost pile. In the fall,

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do the same with your leaves. This will help you save some money on fertilizer.

If you do plan on having a large garden added to your landscaping, when you plough, you should pick up the larger pieces of sod. Instead of turning them under, shake them off, and use them for a compost pile.

It's going to take more than spading to prepare your land for a garden. Spading usually will leave large lumps of soil. As you are spading the ground, try to break up these large lumps of soil as best as you can. The soil has to be nice and smooth in order for the seeds to take root. If your soil isn't properly broken up, the seed can not penetrate the soil. It will just get stuck in the lump of soil and not go into the earth. The spade is not the best tool for breaking up the soil sufficiently. A rake is a great tool for breaking up medium to medium large chunks of soil. If you have large chunks of soil, the best garden tool is the hoe.

Most novice gardeners do not know how to properly use a hoe. The hoes main task is to get rid of weeds and mix up the surface soil. In the summer it is used to help the soil retain moisture. Many people hoe the soil too aggressively. They hack and whack at the soil too hard. Hoeing should not be extremely vigorous. Spading should be vigorous, but not raking and hoeing.

Once all the lumps of soil are broken up, use the rake to smooth it out. Now the majority of work for your beautiful new landscaping garden is done. It will be hard work up until this point, but once your garden is planted and your flowers or vegetables begin to grow, all this hard work will be well worth the effort.

Simon Morris is a long studied landscape design expert with 25 years of field expirience. You can find more articles written By Simon Morris on his Gardening website www.Garden-now.com. You can also find his articles on www.linkmyarticles.com.

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