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soil conditioning
Soil conditioning largely depends on the size of your garden. So before you get into the big stuff, make sure you have an idea of how big your garden will be. If you’re making a relatively small garden (4x4ft – 10x10ft) you won’t have to worry about drainage or changing the soil every season. For example, if you’re making a raised bed garden, you won’t have to till your yard grass to do it, you can simply build the bed and fill it with soil and compost. Compost is a great medium for plants to grow in and requires no extra work to get great results, plus it will drain well on its own.
With larger gardens (10×20 feet, 1 acre or more), the ability to compost becomes very expensive, time consuming, and you can still have flooding that will kill your plants. With a larger garden, tilling the lawn or dirt is the first step. The soil needs to be broken, once it is broken, it can be planted. Many people use a tiller or disc to break up the soil, but depending on the size, you can easily rent equipment or invest in buying some equipment to prepare the soil each year. Once you’ve stirred up some of the soil and broken it down into little chunks smaller than your fist and at least 5 inches deep, you need to focus on preparing for drainage. Take a step back and look for low spots in the landscape and dig a small trench or buy a drainage pipe to put into the ground before all the plants are buried. This is a CRITICAL step, don’t overlook or ignore it, a heavy rain could kill half your garden in a matter of a day or two and there will be nothing you can do (yes it happened to me). Since the soil is tilled and loose, it is very easy to dig a drainage ditch or lay plastic pipes. Depending on the size, you may only need a shovel and a couple of hours or heavy equipment to dig the trench.
As I said before, planning all of this can be the difference between success or failure. Taking a few hours to step back, look at what you want to do and where, and then see it before you is a powerful way to succeed the first time instead of suffering through trial and error.