Get Your Spring Vegetable Garden Ready With Soil Preparation

Now it's time to think about planting a spring garden. The first thing to do before planting is to prepare the garden bed. This includes clearing the beds, plowing the soil, and providing enough nutrients for the new plants.

Clear the garden

One of the first steps is to remove old plant debris if you did not do so at the end of the last growing season. The exception is if you're growing legumes (beans or peas) and if they're healthy, it's best to let them decompose on their own. Legumes are a good source of nitrogen and return to the soil as they decompose.

All other plants, especially diseased and sick ones, should be removed. If you don't remove them and leave them in place or put them upside down in the dirt, diseases and insects will remain in the soil and come back to haunt you later.

This also applies to weeds. If you leave the weeds in place, leave the weed seeds in place and they will come back in the next growing season. Weeding is best done with a sharp hoe and weeds must be carefully removed, roots and all. If you regularly pick your hoe around the yard and pull out the weeds, your hard work will pay off in a cleaner yard.

Weeds are a problem in your garden because they compete with vegetables for water and nutrients in the soil. Ideally, you don't want your vegetables to compete with unwanted plants. Most chemical weed killers are not suitable for the garden and are generally not recommended in gardens where someone is going to eat the plant afterwards.

Soil diseases such as downy mildew can be a big problem for tomatoes, potatoes and peppers. Once in the soil, rot can kill these plants year after year. Other popular vegetable crops such as zucchini, squash, cucumbers, and melons are susceptible to downy mildew and cucurbit borer. Leaving these plants in the ground to rot or roll over in the ground provides an obvious route for diseases and insects to enter the soil and your future plants.

Any diseased and insect infested plants should be removed from your garden and discarded. While healthy plants can be composted, it's best not to add diseased or insect-infested plants to your compost pile unless you can control the temperature and make sure it's hot enough to kill diseases and insects.

make beds

Once you've cleared out your garden, you'll want to rework or cultivate the soil in which you grow vegetables. Although the terms "cultivation" and "cultivation" are used interchangeably, they are different.

Cultivation involves cutting the soil with a flat blade (four inches deep or less), loosening the soil, and increasing air and water penetration, which allows new plants to access available nutrients.

The cultivation was deep and penetrated less than 10 centimeters into the ground. Processing usually occurs in one of these three states. First, when you are making a new bed for the first time, second, when you are adding a lot of organic matter (such as compost), or third, when you are trying to change the acidity of the soil by adding limestone or sulfur. . existing bed.

Extension officials advise gardeners to dust their beds at the end of the growing season and remove any old plants with insects, diseases, and weeds. If you don't follow any of the three steps above, no deep editing is required.

Shelter for plants and beds

Overwintering is best in your clean garden with foliage or shelter. In Tallahassee, we are fortunate to plant at least twice a year, in spring and fall, but even if you are growing two crops, you will need to remove old planting material at the end of each growing season.

In addition to pest and pest propaganda, I found many references to the disadvantages of conventional cultivation. For example, another disadvantage that I experienced was the formation of hard soil under the growing area, which is difficult to moisten. In my home, I have replaced my 25 year old bed with a raised bed over the past two years.

In the 25 years that I have used my beds, I have added new soil and compost every year with a shovel to turn over the old soil and introduce new organic matter. This is not cultivation, it is deeper than cultivation. When digging up old soil from a raised bed, the top 10-12 inches come out easily, and then I hit hard soil that I didn't know existed.

Hard ground is like concrete. Neither water nor roots can penetrate inside. I had to use an ax to dig out that part of the old bed that had turned into hard dirt. You don't want it in your garden.

In the gardens of the Tallahassee Museum in 1880, a volunteer master gardener cleaned the garden a week before plowing and planting. Based on the best home gardening practices I've researched, a gardener can plant on the same day for a week.

Add nutrients to the soil

If you have concerns about the nutritional value of the soil in your home garden, remember that your soil can be tested by the Leon County Development Department for a small fee. Our friendly Consulting Manager, Mark Tanzig, will walk you through the results of your soil analysis and what you can do to correct any defects that may be found in soil testing.

For more information on Florida home gardens, see North Florida Gardening Guide, Florida Gardening Guide, or Florida Gardening Series.

Want to learn more about gardening and get free seeds?

Starting Feb. 18, Leon County residents can use their library card to "collect" up to five packets of seeds per month through the Leon County Seed Library Program. Vegetable seeds can be viewed at any of the seven branches of the library.

Brenda Buchan is a volunteer gardener with UF/IFAS Extension Leon County, an equal opportunity organization. If you have gardening questions, please email the extension office at AskAMasterGardener@ifas.ufl.edu.

This article originally appeared in Tallahassee Democrats: Tips for Improving Your Garden This Spring.