Spring is here and it’s time to prepare your garden. These tips will help you get your garden ready in no time and help you have a great growing season.
Before the arrival of spring, you need to ensure that your garden is ready for it. If you’ve worked on your soil and conducted enough cleaning, you won’t have any problems with sowing new seeds and transplanting any seedlings. With that in mind, check out our guide on preparing your garden for spring.
5 Steps To Prepare Your Garden for Spring
1. Clean and Repair Your Garden
The first thing in your spring gardening checklist should be cleaning your property. In particular, get your garden tools out a month before you grow any plants. Cleaning the garden at this time ensures that you can work on the soil without any worries. Look for any dried leaves, twigs, and branches lying on the garden beds and remove them — you can even place the leaves in your compost pile.
Apart from clearing out any debris, check the gates and fences. Repair any damaged sections and consider replacing those that have significantly deteriorated in quality. Even your garden tools need some cleaning. Remove any rust and dirt, sharpen the shears, and apply oil to those tools that require lubrication. Failure to do so can lead to the proliferation of fungal diseases.
2. Grow the Seeds Indoors
You can begin planting indoors while the weather still isn’t warm enough to improve the soil conditions. By spring, you would already have seedlings that just need to be transplanted to your garden. Growing indoors simply requires a container — even a simple cup would do as long as it has a depth of at least three inches. Just put some holes at the bottom for water drainage. In fact, containers made of paper can be used for composting after transplanting the seedlings.
If you will plant a lot of seeds in many containers, get a tray for keeping all of the containers in one place. Apart from making it easier to move the containers around, the tray will prevent any unwanted spills whenever you irrigate the seedlings. Remember to remove any excess water after watering the containers.
3. Remove Weeds and Apply Mulch
Ensure that no weeds or decaying plant materials are in the soil before you work on the soil. You can use an herbicide, but you can also manually pull them out. Remove the completely — weeds can still proliferate in your garden if the roots remain. Getting rid of them now will save your garden from a disastrous weed problem that can last throughout the year.
On a related note, you can place some cardboard or landscape fabric on the soil surface. Afterward, add a layer of mulch that’s at least three inches thick. Apart from improving the amount of moisture, this layer of mulch will impede new weeds from developing. Another effective solution against aggressive weeds is to grow a combination of trees, shrubs, and perennials to limit the space for their spread.
4. Begin Working on the Soil
Now that you’ve cleaned the garden, you have to work on the soil so that the seedlings you will transplant soon will grow well outside. Of course, the same goes for the seeds you will sow in spring. A significant factor in the success of this procedure is to know when the soil is dry enough. When you work on soil that is still very wet due to the ice and snow melting, you encourage soil compaction.
To determine if the soil is dry enough or not, you should simply get a clump of soil by the hand. Squeeze the soil tightly and turn it into a ball. If the soil retains its round shape after being squeezed, it’s still wet. If it breaks up as you squeeze it, it’s adequately dry and loose. We recommend using a broad fork to work on the soil.
5. Start Amending the Soil
Apart from working on the soil, you must also amend it. This ensures that there are enough nutrients to support the growth of new and mature plants alike. You can use synthetic fertilizers, but organic options also abound.
For example, you can add a layer of compost to the soil using kitchen scraps and natural garden debris. Using compost will also improve the capacity of the soil to drain water. Other options include using only the grass clippings instead of a compost pile and the aforementioned application of mulch.
In conclusion, there are a lot of things you can do to prepare your garden for the spring season. You can begin growing seeds indoors, clean the garden, and improve the soil quality. If you have any queries, leave a comment below.
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- How to Prepare Your Garden for Spring - March 22, 2018
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