Your homegarden may still be cover in snow , but before you bed it it ’ll be metre to put on your clay boots , pick up your spadeful and protrude preparing for bounce planting . It ’s time to get a plan together for your constitutional garden and here are a few matter to consider before you put your boots on .
1. What garden maintenance needs to be done?
The winter weather condition may have damaged yourfence , compost bin , garden shed , walkway , etc . Inspect everything as soon as you ’re able , inquiry and budget for the repair ( or upgrade ) and get it done as presently as conditions allows .
2. What are you planting?
Remember to practice good principles ofcrop gyration : do n’t plant a garden bed with the same crop inside of 5 years ( if that ’s unacceptable , make it 3 ) . Pests of a special plant can live in the filth over the winter and if you planttomatoes , peppers , potatoes , melon , squash , etc in the same bed as last year , you ’ll make it easy for those same pests to destroy your plants again . Rotating your crops denies those cuss their favorite solid food and place to be and they ’ll either move on or be eat on by a vulture .
Also consider planting Marigolds , Sunflowers , Borage , Cornflower , Fennel , Mint , and other good plant near your vegetables and fruit . These are loved by the beneficial insects which feed on the nasty bugs that infect your garden . you’re able to interplant beneficials with your crops or surround your garden with them . Besides provide food and shelter for thebeneficial insects , they ’ll also sum up lots of beautiful color . This is an constitutive practice that ’s C old and is very reliable for keeping your garden ’s pest universe in residue so you do n’t have to resort to pesticides .
3. Thinking about a new raised garden bed?
Ideally , you should organize a new raised garden bed in the Fall and lease compost go to work in it over the winter . But if you ’re like me and frequently run out of time late in twilight , you could definitely do this early in bounce .
The key to a successful garden layer is sun . search at the orientation of your landscape painting and spend a day tracking the breaking ball of the sun over your property . Dig that young raised garden bottom on an East - West axis vertebra so it will receive unmediated light from sunrise to sunset ( this orientation will efficaciously look the bed south ) .
Last yr I create two Modern raised garden beds early in the spring which were reserved for a June planting of edible corn . I load them with horse manure and compost from kitchen scraps , grass clippings , bush cuttings , pine needles , and other yard waste . They were in middling good shape by the sentence I set – the grunge was n’t as loamy as I ’d care , but it did the chore just fine – dozens of auricle of delectably sweet maize .
4. Order vegetable and flower seeds now
Once you ’ve decided what you ’re going to implant , you ’ll want to think about start some of those plant in spite of appearance so you may get a jump on the time of year . See my post onseed startingand then check out the site of seed company you ’ve done business with in the past – company that furnish reliable semen . Try a few crops you have n’t plant before to produce biodiversity .
5. Start a garden journal
Since I started agarden daybook , it ’s been an indispensable resource of ideas , successes and failed experiments ( we so well bury our mistakes until we make them again ) . Most of us ca n’t remember from year to year where we bought the seed that turned into the greatest tomato we ever try out , or how much compost tea leaf we poured on our plants , or what the atmospheric condition wasreallylike the previous June . Re - reading last year ’s garden journal before you begin plotting this year ’s constituent garden will be immensely helpful in not repeating mistake and help to duplicate success .
