How to Prepare Raised Garden Beds for Summer Veggie Planting
Spring is the season to begin the work necessary to prepare your garden to receive little vegetable starts that will grow to delicious size in the coming summer. Raised beds require preparation for the tender beginnings of your summer bounty. Place tender transplants into raised beds after the chance of frost has past. Does this Spark an idea?
Things You'll Need
- Shovel
- Stakes
- Humus, peat moss, or compost
- Newspaper
- Wood chips or cocoa hulls
Instructions
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New Beds
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1
Map out the area for a bed measuring 4 feet wide and as long as you wish; lengths of 8 and 16 feet are standard. Place small stakes in each corner.
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2
Dig in a corner, working on a section measuring 2 by 4 feet, to begin to remove the sod. Place sod in a corner of the yard and leave it to decompose into compost. Continue digging your new bed down to a depth of at least 18 inches. Place soil from the first section at the the other end of the bed. Dig your next section and put the soil from that section into the first, making sure that it is broken up and well aerated. Continue until you fill the last section with the dirt from the first.
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3
Test your soil with a pH test kit to determine if it has the neutral pH preferred by vegetables. Add organic matter such as humus, peat or compost to sandy soil, and add rough grade sand to soil with a high clay content, as well as organic matter.
Established Beds
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4
Turn the soil and aerate it down to at least 18 inches, breaking up clods. Mix in humus, peat moss, matured compost or thoroughly rotted manure. For an 8-foot bed, add 6 cubic feet of peat moss or 3 cubic feet of a good compost or humus mixture, Mix the soil amendments in well.
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5
Cover the bed, which is now ready for planting, with newspaper to keep weeds down. Weight the paper with wood chips, additional humus or cocoa hulls. Poke a hole in the newspaper and dig a hole below the newspaper layer large enough for the root ball. Soak the newspaper several times before planting to make it soften up.
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6
Feed your starts or seeds with plant food and provide plenty of water.
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References
- Photo Credit George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images
