7 Ideas And Tips To Prepare Your Garden Soil

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The better your garden soil is the better your home garden will grow which also means you’ll end up getting better nutrition from your produce through your very own vegetables. Whether you’re planting a garden bed of flowers to wow the neighbors or growing food for your family, you can see amazing results by improving your garden soil and can have excellent soil fertility.

Preparing your garden soil is easier than you might think. Even new gardeners can do this. We’ll get into the proper type of soil for your new vegetable garden or a small garden later in the post.

The best thing you can do to Prepare Your Garden Soil is to start with a great compost. The best way to get the best results for your garden compost is to use a compost bin and fill it with kitchen scraps, grass clippings, and layers of newspaper.

Adding an inch of compost or more to your garden’s soil will help the soil structure and plant growth.

Peat moss is also a good idea since it can help the soil retain moisture and good soil preparation with good soil amendments make for a very happy and healthy garden that produces well.

While building your own compost pile is a long process well worth the effort, you may be looking for a quicker option. You can purchase compost from your local nursery or any place that sells gardening supplies. Walmart has many different options, Amazon has many, as well. You can even look at Ace Hardware and Lowe’s.

You might also like: How To Compost In The Winter

Feed your scraps to your garden, too. Leftover coffee grounds, crushed egg shells, and chopped up banana peels can go right into your new garden soil to help build your healthy garden soil.

Be sure to add lots of organic matter and organic material to your garden area to prepare your garden soil, as well. Things such as twigs, leaves, and chopped up yard waste help to make great organic matter for your soil without costing you any money.

Plus, the addition organic matter is a great way to have healthy soil and high quality soil for your garden beds and healthy plants. If you have sandy soil, this will make a world of difference!

Add at least 2 inches of organic matter or a few inches of compost each growing season.

Growing good cover crops and tilling them into your healthy garden soil at the end of the season can do amazing things for your soil, too. Do some research online or ask your local nursery what a good ground cover for your area would be that would help you obtain rich soil at the end of the season when you till it back in.

Plant nitrogen enriching vegetable plants like green beans mixed in with other compatible vegetables and vegetable crops. The beans will feed other young plants much-needed nitrogen all growing season. At the end of the season till everything that is left back in to the soil.

Adding earthworms to your good garden soil can make it a great place for growing vegetables. They dig tunnels through the soil surface which increases the air flow, as well as adding nutrients to your bountiful gardens and improving the capacity for the healthy soil to hold moisture which, in turn, provides a great invitation for good bacteria to grow.

Earthworms can be found relatively inexpensively at your local garden store, garden centers, or bait shop. Check with your nursery or local gardeners to see what type of worms they get for your area and where they purchase them.

You can also purchase them on Amazon, as well as “worm castings” which according to Google is: a convoluted mass of soil, mud, or sand thrown up by an earthworm or lugworm on the surface after passing through the worm’s body.

You might also like: DIY Vermicomposting With A Worm Bin!

If you think your soil PH balance could be off causing your plants to struggle, just get a simple soil testing kit to do a soil test to help find out what your soil needs. Sometimes we need to take a deeper look and these simple at home test kits can help you do just that. You can get them from Walmart, Amazon, as well as Ace Hardware and local gardening supply stores.

You also want to provide plenty of mulch. Rich organic matter like mulch helps to hold in moisture helping you save on your watering bill, as well as providing weed control by smothering out weeds that can pop up through your soil. A thick layer of mulch can make your soil the perfect place for plants to grow.

Bark mulch is a good choice to start with to help your vegetable garden beds retain moisture to your plant’s roots. It also makes helps ensure your plants get enough water without giving them too much water.

Mulch shades shallow plant roots, traps in heat on cool nights, and helps keep water from evaporating out of your soil before your plants can put it to work. You can purchase mulch at any place you find gardening supplies.

I purchase mine at Ace Hardware and Walmart. I like to order it online and then just pop in the store to pick it up. At the end of each season just till the old mulch right into the garden to provide quality organic matter and plant materials to any soil type.

You might also like: What Is The Best Mulch To Use In The Garden?

I hope these tips and ideas on how to Prepare Your Garden Soil are helpful to you. Do you have more you’d like to share? We’d love to hear your successes in the garden!

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Are you looking for the best means to prep your garden soil? These 7 tips & tricks