How to Prepare a Bed for Planting

How to Prepare a Bed for Planting (Making It: Radical Home-Ec)

"You don't grow plants, you grow soil." - "Topsoil is a living thing."


We'll need:
a soil test
Quality compost
soil amendments (as recommended by the soil test report)
sharp shovel or long-handled spade
pitchfork

A soil test tells you what amendments you need to add to make vegetables happy and also lets you know if your soil contains anything bad, such as lead or other heavy metals. All you have to do is send soil samples to a testing center. Just follow their directions. Many county extension offices offer free or low-cost soil testing services. IF you've lead or other contaminants in your soil, we recommend building raised beds and filling them with imported soil or growing in containers.

Determine the perimeter of the bed and establish pathways around it. Design the bed so you can reach the center of the bed from both sides. Generally, it's best to orient the garden north-south. Plant tall things on the north side where they won't shade the rest of the garden. Vegetables need as much as 6 hours of good light a day.

Vegetables need at least 2 feet of rich, fluffy soil for best growth. They not grow in hard compressed soil. You should be able to plunge your hand into the soil without much resistance. If this is not the case, you'll have to "double-dig."

Double-digging is a method for loosening the soil and working in compost. The addition of compost is essential. Compost not only provides nutrients that plants need, it also helps keep the soil loose and improves the ability to retain water. Double-digging is not the same as tilling. Tilling turns the soil upside down, sending the most biologically active part underground and bringing less-rich soil to the top. That's not what you want. Double-digging is about loosening the texture of the soil while disturbing it as little as possible.

Mark the boundaries of your bed and clear any weeds with a hoe. Once clear, distribute a 1 inch layer of compost evenly over the area of the bed. Starting at one end of the bed, dig out a trench a foot wide and a foot deep that stretches the width of the bed. Make the trench as neat as possible. Put the soil you remove aside, away from the bed. You won't use this section of soil in this bed again. Next, take a pitchfork and plunge it to the bottom of the trench, using your foot to press it down. Wiggle the prongs to loosen the soil at the bottom of the trench. Push the fork as deep as it will go, so that you're loosening as much soil as you can. Do this over and over, all along the length of the trench.

Now step onto the bed and position yourself a couple of feet away from the trench, facing the trench. Plunge the spade straight through the compost, 1 foot away from the trench. Push the spade as deep as it will go. Shove that 1 foot of soil forward into the open trench. Don't scoop it up or mix it, just push it forward and let it fall into the trench. This way you disturb the soil as little as possible. Work your way along the length of the trench, pushing one spade's depth worth of soil after another into the trench. When you've traveled the length of the bed, the original trench should be filled in, and a new 1 inch-wide, 1 foot-deep trench created. Loosen the soil at the bottom of this new trench with the prongs of the fork, as you did the last time. Then step backward another pace and do it all over again. Proceed like this until you reach the end of the bed. When it's done, the entire bed will be composed of loose soil. Apply amendments recommended by the soil test over the bed in amounts specified by the test.

Water the bed thoroughly and, ideally, wait 2 weeks before planting. This will germinate weed seeds, which you can pull out before you plant.