Starting A New Garden
If your summer days allow and you have a little room left on your land, consider adding some texture to your gardens by adding a raised bed. Raised beds make an excellent garden for plants that require good water drainage. Find out the drainage required for every plant you buy, and make sure that it won’t conflict with any of the areas you are considering planting in.
Creating a raised bed involves setting a border around the area you want to plant and then adding enough soil and compost to it to raise it above the rest of the yard. Usual height is an added 6 inches to a foot. On most of our land and therefore in most of my gardens, we raise the bed up by nearly a foot as the soil below is clay and heavy. You’ll be amazed at how much your water drainage will be improved by using the raised bed method.
This summer I am planting in all new locations. After the house fire we re-built in a new location on the land and as such all my existing gardens were left behind. Before moving them I surveyed the land around the new house. Freshly excavated I didn’t have much sod to remove. I simply needed to create the border that would hold the dirt and manure I moved in and prepared to plant and transfer perennials from their existing location. Although we used old, split cedar logs, you can also use a few pieces of lumber, stacked if you like. Once the wall is created, add your dirt and manure or manure/compost mix.
In previous years I had to create new garden beds where grass and weeds had grown for years. With a fresh garden spade I cut sod and topsoil around the perimeter of the garden, flipped it over and laid a tarp over the mess for a few hot summer days to kill off the grass roots below. This may sound like a simple task, but it does require some muscle and vigor so get help if you need it. If you don’t have a few days to wait or any tarps on hand, add a 2″ layer of straw on the grass roots to discourage it from growing back up. When you’re ready to plant just add the soil to the top of the straw and set in your new plants.
Planting your plants in your new area shouldn’t pose any difficulty. It is the same process as your usual garden planting. Just be sure that the roots don’t extent too far into the original ground level. The whole point of creating the raised bed is to keep the roots out of the soil which saturates easily. Having long roots that extend that far completely diminishes your original intention.
In order to test how much water your designated patch of soil will retain, dig a hole approximately ten inches deep. Fill it with water, and come back in a day when all the water had disappeared. Fill it back up again. If the 2nd hole full of water isn’t gone in 10 hours, your soil has a low saturation point. This means that when water soaks into it, it will stick around for a long time before dissipating. This is unacceptable for almost any plant, and you are going to have to do something to remedy it if you want your plants to survive.
Once you have plants in your new bed, you’ll notice an almost immediate improvement. The added soil facilitates better root development. At the same time, evaporation is prevented and decomposition is discouraged. All of these things added together makes for an ideal environment for almost any plant to grow in. So don’t be intimidated by the thought of adjusting the very topography of your yard and adding some textural interest.
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