How to Get Your Garden Ready for Spring
Spring is here, which means it’s time to get your garden ready for a new planting cycle! After a long and cold winter, it’ll be tough to get your garden ready to go, but with a little bit of sweat and hard work, you’ll soon have a bountiful garden.
Check Your Supplies
Before you can get your garden ready for spring, you’ll need to check your supplies. Do you have the supplies you need to prepare the ground and plant some flowers or vegetables? Some supplies you might find helpful to have on hand includes a rake, shovel, gardening gloves, wheelbarrow, and anything else that can help you dig around in the dirt.
Clean out Your Beds
Once you have all of your tools, you’re ready to start pulling weeds and anything left over from your annuals. Weeds will quickly choke the life out of your beautiful flowers or plants, so it’s important that you start your spring garden without them. Weed early and weed often and you will find yourself free to enjoy your garden come summer.
Annuals aren’t coming back and any self-seeders will have already done what they can so remove the mess and neaten up your garden space. Also check your perennials – as soon as you see new growth at ground level you are free to get rid of the brown leaves.
You will also want to prune any woody perennials and ornamental grasses you may have as this can only be done in spring. It’s helpful to keep a logbook of which plants require this each year.
Break Up the Ground
After a long winter, the dirt in your garden is probably packed down and hard. This is not a good environment for your plants to grow in, so you’ll want to loosen it up. If possible, you can use a rototiller to loosen the soil. If you don’t have this option, then you can use a rake or a hoe to break up the ground.
Fertilize
You’ll also want to fertilize the soil in your garden. Once the soil has been loosened up, you can mix fertilizer in with the soil, turning it over so that the fertilizer is deep enough to give nutrients to your plants’ roots. If you don’t want to buy fertilizer, you can start a compost pile and use compost to help fertilize the soil in your garden.
Divide and Transplant
Spring is the ideal time of year to divide and transplant your growing perennials. It keeps them healthy and down to a manageable size. If you don’t need the extra plants that come from dividing you can always donate them to a local church plant sale.
After you’ve prepared the soil in your garden for your plants, you’re ready to have some fun! What will you plant in your garden this year?
Looking forward to cleaning up and gardening with my girl…..almost time 🙂
I can’t wait either! I got Keira adorable gardening gloves and a tool set from Target a couple weeks ago.
Great score! I’ll have to keep my eyes open for a set…..should have looked at Target while I was there.
Can’t wait until I can get working on my gardens! I always love watching them come to life in the Spring.
I’ve been procrastinating but these tips got me a bit excited. This is the weekend.
thank you for this post! i have it bookmarked. we just bought our first house a year and a half ago. I have never done or taken care of a garden before but hoping this spring we can put our house up for sale so I would love for the outside to draw people in. I can look back on your notes 🙂
Yes on the fertilization! Nothing is more important than making sure the soil is ready to go. I also make sure I read the labels on my seeds to see when it is recommended on planting times. Sometimes being 2 weeks off means there’s no crop!
Great tips!! We do the fertilization, I think it’s vital to healthy plants. Since we moved last summer, we’ll be having to build a ‘shader’ for our plants requiring shade.
I am really looked forward to gardening this year. Spring is early and I love it!
Bookmarked this page for next year!
At the rate we’re going it will be summer before we do any of that …another nice storm since last night , to go thru late saturday …like mother nature was scared we’d run out of snow or something (its still past my knees in the back yard where the garden is lol)