I have attached the current situation of the garden bed (it’s about 8x20ft) the other photo is of how the garden looked when we got the house in the spring I.e. a bunch of grass and weeds. The amount of dry grass that stiff pronged rake and I piled up is insane but now I don’t know what to do next. Should I till the whole thing? Should I put a tarp down after I till? I’ve Googled and YouTubed this question a lot and asked multiple grandmothers and have not gotten a consistent answer as to how to get from the state it’s in to where I can attempt to grow vegetables lol. Any help is appreciated!
by Loucityfan
7 Comments
Don’t till unless you have incredibly compacted clay soil.
You could get your soil tested to see what nutrients it lacks for vegetables.
The easiest next step is to add a couple inches of compost.
So, in my area the grass scourge is Bermudagrass, which is insidious. Solarization alone never killed it for me, and I had to use a fork to remove as much as possible, THEN sheet mulch with 2-3 layers of cardboard, with compost on top, and run a growing season of cover crop to break everything down. I also had to take out adjacent grass to remove reservoirs for infiltration (it’s a wood chip path along the garden beds now). I STILL weed out a ton of stolons every year, but it’s getting slowly better.
I tell you this story on case you have the same grass situation, to deal with it up front and go hard fighting it, to make your life easier later.
Next steps outside of any Bermudagrass issues depends on when you want to plant. This year, I’d sheet mulch with compost, and get a green crop on it ASAP. If you’re OK with a fallow season, cover crop mix and chop and drop it. You can even get a spring cover crop in, chop and drop, and plant summer veg through the green manure if you wanted.
Honestly I think the easiest step is just to rake, then add a layer of compost and top soil. You can test your soil if you want but it’s not completely required. The plants you add into the bed can help add nutrients to the soil and such.
One of the most “famous” methods is adding Legumes (usually some kind of bean) to your bed, sprinkled in, as a nitrogen fixer.
Some things like carrot/daikon/etc break up the soil a little when you harvest rhem and leave air pockets and whatnot 🙂
Tillers are a pain, get a good broad fork and forget the tiller. After a while you won’t even use it much if you do it right.
You have an option to lasagna garden at this point. That’s how I created my soil in a 10×50 plot roughly the same quality.
Take all the dried matter you raked out, put it back into the garden bed and bury with a chip drop (12”). You can add more “layers” based on what you have available… so manure, food waste, etc. the more hot matter the longer you should let it simmer before planting into it… but I also do a hot bed for starting my corn & pumpkins early so, that could also be a strategy!
Depending on your goals for this year you could:
1) vegetable garden- top dress w some compost and blood meal as you add your seedlings
2) continue building soil for next year- plant a summer of wildflowers, vetch, sunflowers, and lacy phacelia. Let them die and rot in place. For winter plant tillage daikons that you let rot in place.
Or a combo of 1&2 where you let half the plot be gardened and half the plot build soil.
I did #2 with like 5 sungolds my first year, keeping an eye out for any invasives popping up that I could weed out.
it worked really well to set me up for future success.
That grass is going to be an absolute pain and will grow up through anything you put down. I’d get a pitch fork to loosen the dirt then hand pull as much as possible, dont till it because all that will do is chop up and spread the grass and also mix in any seeds that are dormant under the soil and you’ll have awful weeds when the weather gets warm. Next thing I would do is put down a layer of cardboard and mulch and then some raised beds. Raised beds and soil can be expensive but you have more control over the nutrients in the soil and you won’t have as many issues with the grass and weeds coming up.
Highly recommend checking out Charles Dowding on YouTube to learn no dig