As the snow slowly melts every spring my thoughts typically turn to my garden and what I will be planting this year. What you decide to plant is all based on personal preference but the quality of your crop will depend on the work you put in now. Spring is a crucial time to prep your garden and prepare it for the growing season (although the growing season will be very short this year for us). For my garden I use all raised beds. I don’t have to many weed problems in the bed themselves but the spaces between my beds last year grew some pretty large weeds. This year I will be laying down a layer of plastic in between all of my raised beds to prevent weed growth. This is a much easier alternative to pulling up weed after weed on a daily basis. The garden beds themselves need some prep work right now as well. I need to remove any remainder of last years crop (mainly old corn stalks) and turn the soil over in the beds. Since my beds are small I just do this by hand with a garden rake. At this point i’m at least a month away from being able to plant so what I do next is add nutrients to the soil. Every gardener has their own method of this whether it’s fertilizer or compost or even both. I like to add some organic garden fertilizer as well as a good layer of fresh compost to all of my garden beds. Once all of this is mixed in I water all of the beds down thoroughly. Over the next few weeks the nutrients from the compost and fertilizer will mix in with your existing soil and give you a good base to plant your crops in. Keep a good eye in the following weeks before you plant your crops and make sure that no weeds pop up in your planting beds. A lot of times you can get weeds from your compost and you want to get those out of there as soon as possible. Please share with us any of your tricks you like to use to prep your garden beds or just simply let us know what you will be growing this year. We look forward to hearing from you!!!
