A Common Life
Welcome to A Common Life where Morgan and Taylor offer month-by-month gardening advice to help your garden thrive. We also share our personal journey in seasonal living, aiming to foster a deeper connection with others, nature, and our Creator. Our hope is to encourage and equip others who are on a similar journey and to provide a space for community around these ideals.
A Common Life
29. Getting Your Neglected Garden Ready for Spring!
In this episode I talk all about getting your garden ready for spring planting.
Mentioned in the show:
Garden Fork
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Music on the podcast was composed by Kevin Dailey. The artist is Garden Friend. The track is the instrumental version of “On a Cloud”
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of a common life podcast. I'm your host, Taylor, and in this episode I'm going to be talking about getting your garden ready for spring planting. I actually just got off the phone with the husband of a subscriber and he was telling me how he'd built some raised beds and that they haven't touched them since last spring since the birth of their last baby. He said they're a mess. I'm kind of imagining that some gardens might look like that. It's pretty common. You get overwhelmed because you didn't clear it out in the fall. The fall is a busy time. You planted stuff, you harvested it and then it kind of fell into the background. Now spring is rolling around and it's still kind of gray and grungy outside, but it's like time to put stuff in the ground and your garden is a mess. So what do you do? Well, that's what I wanted to talk about in this episode. I just want to give you a few pointers and tips and some ideas to help you feel encouraged and not feel like you're totally alone in this endeavor. So I am assuming that you have a garden bed area, whether it's above ground or it's in ground, you have a garden area and you're wanting to plant a spring garden and get it going. So, to tell you, the first thing you're going to need to do is get all the weeds out. So if you just let it go after the summer garden and you didn't do anything, inevitably there were definitely weeds that grew up in there, and maybe even some of the plants that you had last year in the garden are still there. They're brown, rotted. Now what you're going to need to do is to get all of that out. Of course, but when you're getting that out, you want to be really careful and try your hardest to avoid spreading any seeds that are on the plants that you're pulling out. Personally, I like to cut plants out. I prefer not to just yank them out, because leaving the roots in the soil really helps as the roots decompose, it leaves openings in the soil and it keeps feeding the microbes, and so feel free whatever's easiest. If you're overwhelmed and you don't want to cut it all out, just rip it out. That's fine, but do try to make sure you don't spread the seeds. So if you see seeds on these weeds or on the plants in your garden that you're trying to clear out, try to be careful with those and get those out without spreading them.
Speaker 1:The next thing you're going to want to do after you get all of the old plant material out of there is you're going to want to add some compost to your garden. This is going to help refresh the fertility in the soil, bring a little extra carbon material in there, feed some of those microbes and get you ready to start this gardening season off right, so you can go to a local store and get bagged compost. They like the brands. There's mushroom compost and then there's black cow. I've used both, and either of those should do just fine. If you're lucky enough to live close enough to a commercial composting company. I know there's quite a few in certain parts of the country when I am there's not any good ones, so I have to use bagged compost or, even better, I use my own homemade compost, and so if you do compost, now's the time to put that compost out in your garden.
Speaker 1:So after doing that, the next thing that you're going to want to do is aerate your soil. So it's been sitting out all winter and it's been getting the rain and it hasn't had any tilling right, because we're not going to till it, but we do need to aerate it. This is really important to keep your soil from getting compacted. What it does is it introduces oxygen down into the soil and that feeds the microbes. That keeps them active and it helps with water drainage and helps break up any hard pans that are developing, and that'll give us good, soft, supple soil that our roots can go deep into.
Speaker 1:And so to do this, you can use a garden fork or a garden spade If you just Google garden spade, I'll put a link to one in the show notes or you can use a broad fork. I think for most home gardeners, just buying a garden spade from like Home Depot or Lowe's, that's going to be the route you're going to want to go. Broad forks are, generally speaking, more expensive and they work really well. They're a really good tool. But a garden spade will do just as fine. And what you're going to do is you're just going to push this garden spade into the soil straight down, and you can use your body weight to kind of jump on it or push it with your foot, and then, when you get it down as far as you can, you're going to step off of it and you're going to pull back. And when you gently pull back. It's going to lift that soil up and that will really be helpful in providing the oxygen and breaking up any hard pans in your garden.
Speaker 1:Do that all throughout your garden and be careful not to invert oil or turn the soil over. That's not what we're trying to do here. And then, once you get done, the top of your soil might be a little uneven and if that's the case, you can just take a rake or something and straighten it out. The last thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to cover your soil with a mulch, and I'll go ahead and tell you that if this is something you're doing and you're like you're looking out at your garden and it's just a big mess, the way to prevent this from happening and what I highly recommend is doing basically all of this in the fall, before the winter hits, and the biggest thing you can do is mulching. If you just cover your garden soil with mulch throughout the fall and winter, then come spring you won't be doing any of this and your soil is going to be just going to be perfect. So you'll still want to add some compost. Pull the mulch back, add compost, cover it back up, but still, mulching is critical. So go ahead. Once you have pulled the weeds out, you have added some compost, you've aerated your soil, now you're going to want to cover it with an inch or two of some mulch.
Speaker 1:Now I recommend using chopped leaves or wood chips or rameal wood chips. So wood chips, rameal wood chips, kind of the same thing, but they're not. Rameal wood chips are made from twigs and branches that are less than four inches in diameter. I'm pretty sure I'm saying that right, rameal and this is new to me. I'm just learning about rameal wood chips and how significant they are. What they are is basically, like I said, they're twigs or branches that are less than four inches in diameter, and this wood is the newer, younger wood, the newer parts of bushes or trees, and this wood is easier for the microbes to break down and generally they have more nutrients and minerals inside of them, as opposed to wood from larger branches that are mainly just like lignin and other types of wood. Like what is lignin? Well, you know? Honestly, I can't even explain it to you. All I know is that the minerals and nutrients are more present in the newer parts of trees, younger parts of trees, which makes sense, if you think about it, because that's where they're actively growing. That's where the nutrients are mainly needed. So, yeah, if you could get that type of wood chips, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:If you're doing this at home and you like, have a wood chipper, go for the smaller branches and make wood chips out of that. If you're like, hey, I just need some wood chips, don't worry about it, just get some wood chips cover your garden. The best maybe for the home gardener would be chopped leaves, because you might have those around your yard. I love chopped leaves. That's what I use in my garden. I collect them every fall and, yeah, I'm like a leaf hoarder. So, guys, that's it. That's all you got to do.
Speaker 1:If you're trying to get your garden ready, like those four easy steps clear it out, yank those weeds out, cut them off. If you can add some compost, aerate, cover your soil and you're ready to plant. We are in the middle of February right now. If you're listening to this, as you know, close to when it was produced, we're in February and we're planting peas and potatoes. So, yeah, it's like game time. It's like game time, guys. We're in the first quarter, let's go, let's get after it. I hope everyone that is listening to this feels inspired and ready to go get their gardens ready. And until we talk next time, happy gardening.