Preparing the Garden for the Growing Season

It’s gardening season and I’m sharing some tips for how I am preparing the garden for the growing season. I hope they help your garden thrive too.

It’s that time of year, time to think about waking up the garden from its long winter sleep. There are always tasks to do when it comes to getting the garden ready for planting.

From deciding what you’ll be growing this year to preparing the garden for those new plants. It’s an exciting time of year for anyone who gardens.

This time of year is a time of hopefulness and high energy for us gardener. It’s the beginning or garden season. You can’t hardly wait to get your hands in the soil and start planting.

But there are a few things you can do now to help your garden get off to a great start. I’m sharing a bit about our garden and what I do to get ready for the garden season.

Below I’ll share what I discovered to help keep weeds down in the garden all season long. What I do to prepare our vegetable garden and flower gardens too.

A Little About Our Garden

I garden in my backyard, well really it’s the side yard because that is where we get the most sun. My backyard is actually all dense shade and doesn’t really grow anything well except hostas. But we do have lovely hostas.

Our gardening zone is zone 8 and we have four raised beds I plant in. The soil is clay so planting in raised beds is a good option if your soil conditions are less than ideal.

What We Grow in Our Backyard Garden

We grow raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb, strawberries and vegetables in our backyard garden, as well as a few herbs too.

We live in the rainy part of Oregon, so growing hot weather plants can be a challenge, but in years past when we have a warm summer our tomatoes grew up over 5 feet tall.

I’ve also had a bumper crop of baby bell peppers when I get them in early and hand pollinate them.

Preparing the Garden for the Growing Season

It important to get your garden off to a good start by preparing the garden beds. This year I’m doing what I’ve found to work well in the past two years.

My old way of preparing the garden beds would be this process. I would till my beds, add in compost and organic fertilizer then plant.

But I was constantly fighting to get rid of clover. It was awful it kept multiplying everywhere.

Then a couple of years ago I only tilled one of my raised beds.

The rest I covered to kill off the weeds like my friend Jami does in her garden. She has shared doing this keeps her garden weed free so I gave it a try. And it worked.

In the last two years, my garden prep process is simplified to this…

At the end of the growing season or in January when I get around to it. I cover my vegetable garden beds with black plastic and let them sit covered for a month or so. If I’m energetic I’ll weed the beds before I covered them.

When I’m ready to plant, I uncover the beds. I add a layer of compost. I like to use mushroom compost but it is really fragrant so be forwarned. But it is a good fertilizer.

Then I plant.

Last year I only spent one hour all gardening season long weeding. That was it. I still have a few clovers here and there each year but it’s so much better.

If you haven’t given this easy way to garden a try, I would whole heartily recommend it.

How I Prep Our Berries

My strawberries are in their very own raised bed. I don’t cover them since they come back year to year. I just sprinkle mushroom compost on top of them and work it down a bit with my hands. That and watering is all I have to do to keep them growing well.

I’m getting hungry for fresh homegrown strawberries right now.

I needed to move the strawberries because my raspberries were spreading into the strawberries. They both really needed their own dedicated space and now they have it.

Once the weeds are killed off by the covers in my garden beds I’ll add a layer of compost and they will be ready to plant.

Preparing our Flower Garden Beds

Growing flowers at our home is a challenge.

My vegetable garden is situated in the only area of our yard that gets a good amount of sun. The rest of the yard is part sun to dense shade, so most of the plants I grow in our flower beds are shade-loving plants.

We do have a rose garden just outside the vegetable garden fence and that is the only area we have for full sun for our flowers.

My husband loves tending to the roses and that is mainly his area of the garden. We just finished trimming the roses to about knee height and gave them all a dose of Epsom salt. As well as spreading mushroom compost around them so they should be set for awhile.

For the flower beds, in the past, I’ve put down mulch and newspaper to keep the weeds at bay for the growing season.

I would love to put mulch down every year and help keep the ground moist but there is a problem with it. I do add a layer of mushroom compost at least around each plant but I don’t cover our beds with it because we have lots of rain and trees.

We have 7 trees in our average city lot. Which means we are constantly picking up leaves and we use a leaf blower for the job.

If you’ve ever tried to blow leaves out of mulch, you know the mulch goes everywhere. Raking them out isn’t much better.

When we get a nice heavy rain, which happens often in the spring, the mulch washes out on the sidewalk or into the yard. It’s just a mess.

Instead of adding mulch to keep the weeds down I just pull the weeds and put down a weed inhibitor. I do this a couple times of during the growing season.

But laying down a layer of newspaper or cardboard and then covering with the mulch really is a nice weed deterrent if it will work for your garden.

That’s a quick introduction to our garden and how I prepare both the vegetable garden and flower beds for the growing season.

What tips do you have to share about preparing the garden for growing? I would love to have you share your tips in the comments below.

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