How To Prepare a Brand New Garden Bed

Summer is here in full force and the gardens are really starting to come into their own. You’re looking around your yard at your lawn, and thinking “…what if I ripped out that section of grass and installed a flower bed instead?” or “raised beds would look good in that corner…” You’re not alone! Summer always seems to be the time where I do a lot of dreaming and a lot of planning.

But removing the grass you’ve spent years watering and maintaining can be daunting, and the idea of taking on a large landscaping project overwhelming. So I’m here to compile some information that I would have loved to know when I first began my gardening career and starting converting my grass into garden space. Hopefully it’ll be extensive enough to give you confidence in your knowledge and abilities, but not overly extensive to make it seem like an overwhelming task.

There are countless ways to create a new garden space, but the methods I’m about to outline are, in my opinion, easier, cheaper and gentler on the soil comparatively. I’ll address which methods I use and why as we go along.

What is your timeline?

A few of the methods I’ll outline below depend upon your project timeline. Best case scenario? You are doing this research in the summer and are planning on doing the bulk of the work this fall, in order to be ready for planting by spring. The longer you give yourself to study the site, the better! This gives you ample time for any changes you make to the site to settle into their own.

It also gives you time to observe sun patterns. For most annual and perennial gardens, it is recommended you have a plot that gets at least 6 hours of sunlight per day. Obviously, if you are planning a shade garden, you will be selecting plants to fit the specifics of your plot, instead of selecting a plot to fit the specifics of *most* plants. But for everything else, a good rule of thumb is to aim for the 6 hours of sunlight per day. Is your site completely south facing? Does it get dappled shade? Maybe it gets morning sun, mid-day shade and afternoon sun – write all of this down, because these are determining factors into what will thrive in your location!

You’ll also want to take note of how the site holds water. Ideally you want to be planting in a place that has good drainage after a decent watering. To test this, you can take a hose and give it a good water in the am or pm (please don’t water in the middle of a hot day – it is not a good use of this precious resource!) Watch how the soil reacts to the water; does it absorb within 15 minutes? Is your site sloped and cause the water to run off? Or does it pool and puddle and stay in place for hours? This is good information to note, and we will discuss how to amend the soil below.

Also take notes if there are any trees that block ideal sun exposure, and if your location is a favorite location to the local wildlife populations.

In my experience, it is best to prep a new bed in fall for spring planting. Like I mentioned above, this gives the soil ample time to settle and decompose, and it gives YOU plenty of time to address any unforeseen issues prior to planting. It is not impossible to set up and plant a new bed in the spring, it just takes more work upfront.

In ground or raised beds?

Deciding on whether to install beautiful, uniform raised beds or go the route of curvy, whimsical in ground garden beds depends on the soil and your needs and vision for the space. For the ease of this article, I’m going to assume you are creating a new in-ground garden bed. If you are hoping to build raised beds, there are still some tips in here for you as well.

You have done your research, you have spent an adequate amount of time surveying and studying your site…but now you are probably wondering the best way to remove the current weeds and grass on site, huh?

It can be tempting to grab the rototiller and stir up the dirt in place, but I’d caution you away from that direction for a few reasons. Number 1? It is a lot of work! 2. Tilling brings dormant weed seeds to the surface, breaks up rhizomous roots that spread into hundreds of baby plants and it generally just results in more weeds. 3. Tilling disrupts the delicate underground soil system that you need in place in order to be successful in your new garden plot. The soil is alive with so many beneficial microbial critters!

Here are a few approaches you can take to get rid of the initial vegetation, based on your budget and any time constraints that you may have:

Removing by Hand

Obviously a labor intensive choice, but it could be the most effective choice based on how thorough of a job you do. If you are dealing with crab grass/quack grass/Bermuda grass in your lawn like most of us are, hand pulling is probably the best route, at least to some degree. Bermuda grass has crazy deep and long roots that spread like a maze under the turf. But if you can dig out and remove the roots at their source, you will be thanking yourself in the coming years when you’re not having to continue to battle them in your fresh space. They’re pretty tough little suckers.

But if your area is primarily made up of typical “lawn grass”, then you will likely be able to get away with just smothering it with the methods I’ll mention below. If you have a large area of grass to remove, you could also consider renting a sod cutter from your local hardware store. We recently did this for a new community garden that we installed, and it saved us hours of back breaking labor. Plus, we got to give away a lot of sod to people who wanted it! Win win.

Vinegar Spray

I do not recommend using vinegar to kill off the vegetation if you are using the space for in-ground beds. Vinegar is a non-selective herbicide though, meaning it isn’t picky about what plants it kills, and it changes the soil composition for a bit after broadcasting. So be cautious if you are using it near other existing plants and beds. Using vinegar may work if you are prepping your new garden in the fall with plans to grow in the spring, but I have not personally tried this myself to give you the go ahead. I have seen the effects of vinegar spray firsthand though, and it is very effective!

Solarization

Solarization is a highly effective tactic to not only kill the weeds at their roots, but to kill any weed seeds that may exist in the soil that simply have not sprouted yet. To achieve this, you’ll want to first trim or mow the weeds and grass as short as you can possibly trim them. Take some time to dig the roots out of any Bermuda grass, for the reasons we mentioned above. It’s more work now, but less work later.

Once you feel you have dug out the roots, go ahead and shape and level the soil to match your vision for the space – my favorite tool for this job is a sturdy metal short-tined rake. Once that is complete, go ahead and give that area a nice watering to stimulate any hidden weed seeds to germinate.

But wait, aren’t we trying to prevent them from germinating and growing?!

Well, yes, in your new space we are. But right now we are trying to target them and kill them, instead of letting them go into dormancy under the soil. So we want to convince them that the conditions are great for growing, so that way we can utilize the power of the sun to fry them! We are so tricky aren’t we?

Buy some clear or black plastic to lay over your area, and make sure it is as flat against the ground as it can be. Use rocks, bricks, stones, anything heavy to secure the edges so it stays securely in place. You are aiming to create an oven of sorts to bake any vegetation underneath the plastic. Keep this is place for a month or two in the hottest months of the year.

Remove the plastic, and now you have a blank slate to work with. You could use weed fabric to lay in this area now, but I’ve never been a fan of the stuff – I’ve always been underwhelmed by its longevity, or rather, LACK of longevity. I like to use cardboard as a compostable weed fabric of sorts, then heavily mulch with another material.

Cardboard or Newspaper Smothering

Speaking of cardboard! This is the method I like to use in both spring and fall prep for new areas. I go into a lot of detail about how to set up a new garden area using this method in this article , so be sure to check that out if you would like to use this method (which I highly recommend!)

Hugelkultur

The term hugelkultur originates from Germany and at its roots, it means “mound culture”. By building the soil with organic materials, you are creating hills or mounds that you can plant directly into. It is becoming more popular thanks to the permaculture community.

Similar to the “Back to Eden” method I mentioned above, this method relies heavily on feeding and nurturing the soil, adding to it instead of relying on taking away from it. And, on top of that, the soil also gets better and better with each passing year. It is different than the back to eden method in the sense that this involves a vertical component – you are building up raised beds of sorts, just without the wooden sides!

This is a pretty cool method, and one I would love to utilize on a larger scale someday. For now, I have implemented this method in both an in-ground bed as well as in formal raised beds. The photos above are all of the same space, before and after the project. We are implementing a mix of a few methods: hand pulling, smothering with cardboard, and hugelkultur! We rented a sod cutter for the majority of the lawn, hand pulled the rest of the weeds and grass, laid some cardboard over the parts we didn’t have time to remove by hand (we were on a quick time crunch) and covered those areas with wood chips for pathways.

Before planting and laying the wood chips though, we dug an inch or two lower on the spaces that we knew would be pathways, and added that soil to the rows that we knew we would be planting in. We then added composted horse manure mixed with pine shavings, then topped each row with a healthy amount of composted steer manure to plant directly into.

This is a very small-scale and beginner way to implement the style of hugelkultur, but we wanted to work with what we had without requiring a large overhaul and redesign of the space at hand. By digging down the pathways to make them an inch or two lower than the rows of planting space, we are creating a trench system to absorb any excess water, allowing the wood chips to absorb and hold the moisture and allowing the neighboring root systems of the raised mounds to absorb it when they need it.

Check back in a few seasons and you’ll likely see the mounds grow taller and taller! I really like this system, and it’s a great way to sort of segue into formal raised beds, too. You could totally revisit these mounds in a year or two and add wooden or corrugated metal sides to turn them into structures (without compromising the healthy soil web you created underneath!)

Cover Crops

I could write an entire article about cover cropping, but I’ll just say that it is a great way to feed your otherwise unhealthy and bare soil, and a great method for building healthy soil in future in-ground beds. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about cover cropping here because I see it as a long term health plan for your soil, but I knew it would be a shame to not mention it as a way to prep for a new garden space. I recommend doing some research and watching some videos if you have the time!

What are you waiting for? Go grow something!

That wraps it up! Let me know if you have any questions or first-hand knowledge of any of these methods, or if you would like me to expand on any of them a bit more. I’m happy to have any reason to go to the library and do some research in the gardening section. 😉

Happy Growing,

Becca