Preparation is essential if you want to have a successful vegetable patch. In most places, March is the best month for getting your soil ready for the coming sowing and planting.
Use the following steps to make your plot a blank canvas free of weeds that is ready for growing fruits and veggies this year.
How To Get Your Ground Prepared For New Crops
The first thing you should do is walk around the terrain where you intend to grow fruits and veggies.
You need to clear out any rubbish you find. If you find pieces of wood, tiles, or old bricks, stack them up all in one corner of your garden.
They can make for a useful habitat for beneficial insects.
The next thing that you need to do is clear your site of weeds. If you don’t prefer using weedkiller, consider covering your soil up with some heavy block polythene.
If you don’t have any, white polythene and cardboard might also work. Whatever you do, don’t use clear polythene.
This method is also useful for grassy areas you’d like to be a veggie patch.
Use pegs, like metal tent pegs, or just weigh down your polythene along the sides using paving slabs.
This prevents light from getting to weeds, and it also stops your cover from blowing away when the wind is strong.
Leave your cover there for a minimum of two weeks. In addition to getting weeds to start dying off, you’ll also start warming up the soil.
Take the cover away to clear out dead leaves, weeds, and roots. Level your ground with a rake.
Get any big stones out of the way, but don’t fret the small ones. They might actually help get rid of any slugs.
Now, you have your blank canvas to grow things in.
How To Ready Your Ground
When the soil is pre-warmed, it’s better able to help out hardier vegetables with their germination.
Turnips love the cooler weather of Autumn, as do Swiss chard, parsnips, carrots, and broad beans.
These should all be sown into the ground right away.
More tender vegetables can get sown directly into your soil in the middle of May.
That means that once the soil gets even warmer, you can start your courgettes, French beans, and runner beans.
The simplest way of managing your veg patch is by dividing it up into a number of different manageable areas.
A pair of bamboo canes can be tied together using stringlines in order to sectionalize your plot, so you can earmark each area for its own crop.
When space is tight, keep in mind that you can sow some leafy salad crops like lettuce or spinach in places that eventually get taken over by larger plants like pumpkins and courgettes.
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