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| Spring edible and decorative garden |
Sunday, March 10, 2018
Mid-March is the time to get your beds ready for spring! Add compost, fertilizer and mulch before planting your spring veggies, herbs and fruits.
It's a good idea to go ahead and get your bed prepared with all the nutrition your plants will need before planting and mulching. This also avoids damaging your plants while mulching around them or planting them too deep. You want to wait until it is starting to warm up so the soil under the mulch is not too cold. I like to mulch right before I plant, providing some supplemental heat to my new transplants. I mulch my edible garden to keep weeds down, provide organic material to the garden bed, moderate the soil temperature for the entire growing season, and keep moisture in the soil during the summer. Weed free, self fertilizing, till free garden beds
Ideally, you would test your soil to determine what nutrients your bed needs. If you take your soil samples to your local county Co-op Extension office, you can get your soil tested for free in many counties or you can send off for a more thorough analysis. The next step in garden production and your nutrition-soil minerals You can also buy a do it yourself kit at the big box stores or your local nursery. A do it yourself kit will give you the basics of pH, nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium (NPK).
This spring, we will put down an organic fertilizer Re-Vita Pro 5-4-4 or Espoma for the vegetable garden. You can also make your own fertilizer that is less expensive. Make your own fertilizer, it's all natural and inexpensive Then, we add a layer of compost and top with mulch. We used to buy our compost, but have been making our own over the last couple of years. Composting is possible in small spaces or even indoors
The local CSA gardener told me a couple of years ago that it is important to not let your fertilizer just lay on top of the ground as many of the nutrients will be lost, especially the nitrogen.
Planting time is here!
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