Preparing the Soil for Planting a Vegetable Garden

It is wise to decide you want to start a vegetable garden in the fall because you can start making preparations to the soil in your plot area at that time which will ultimately make it easier to plant in late winter or early spring. The amount of work required to prepare your plot’s soil for planting will depend on the condition you are starting from – for example, ours was a completely overgrown mess that required a good deal of labor. Also, you will need to have a coherently designed layout of your garden so you can focus your efforts appropriately.

Existing Plant Growth Removal

You must first remove all of the grass, weeds, bushes, etc that may be growing in the area where you want to plant your vegetable garden. Unfortunately, there really is no technology to make this process much easier on your back. You just need to get in there with shovels, rakes and gloves and start removing all of the unwanted plants. Make sure that you don’t try to take it easy and not get all of the roots out because this will only cause you more work in the end. It’s harder to pull weeds when you are stepping delicately around all of the tiny little crops you don’t want to kill with your boots.

Tilling and Turning the Soil

Some people believe that they can simply rent a tiller and start tilling the soil regardless of existing weeds and grass. This is a bad idea because the tiller probably isn’t going to get the roots of the weeds and it also spreads the plant matter (including their seeds) under and over the garden area. You want to remove the weeds and grass, not simply cut them and then spread their seed potential across your entire garden. Once you have removed all of the existing plants, then you can rent the tiller (or do it the old fashioned way with a shovel) and turn the soil. Also, be sure that you level off your garden area – you don’t want a vegetable garden that isn’t level because of drainage and erosion problems that will ensue.

Test the Soil’s pH and Nutrient Levels Before Adding Fertilizer, Top Soil, or Compost

It’s easy to become overly excited after the intense labor of removing existing vegetative growth and leveling the garden plot and simply put down some fertilizer, top soil, and compost without ascertaining the current quality of the soil. Get a pH and nutrient tester-we purchased a reusable tester that can gauge both pH and nutrient levels for $10 at Home Depot-and follow the directions for use in your vegetable garden plot.

This will help you to determine whether you need to alter your soil’s pH to bring it to neutral. You will also need to know how nutrient rich the soil is so that you can decide what type of fertilizer, if any, is needed. The important nutrients to look for are nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Also be sure to check the optimal nutrient levels for your plants to thrive the best because this will have an impact on the fertilizer you decide to utilize. Our plot’s pH was measured solid neutral pH but slightly below the optimal nutrient range.

Implement a Soil Quality Action Plan

You can ensure the vegetable garden plot is ready to accept seeds or small plants by adding the proper balance of nutrients, water, and potentially pH adjusting materials. Determining the proper combination of these items and the materials you choose to fulfill these requirements is very important. Fertilizing can be done in many different ways and has differing philosophies regarding natural and chemical fertilizers.

Our soil quality action plan consisted of getting a natural 5-10-10 fertilizer. This means the fertilizer has 5% nitrogen, 10% phosphorous, and 10% potassium. There are a vast array of different fertilizers available, so be sure to research what your needs are before setting out to shop. We needed an all-around nutrient enhancer, but not too potent because our soil was just barely below the optimal nutrient range. We also got something called garden soil to mix in our top layer of soil in the vegetable garden plot. Garden soil is a mixture of top soil, compost, and other organic matter that is a rich, black, fertile material. This garden soil was mixed with the appropriate amount of fertilizer and mixed into the top several inches of soil.

Next weekend we will remeasure the nutrient levels and decide whether or not to plant. March 6th is our last frost date so we can put all of these plants in the ground as long as the soil is ready.