Eliminating weeds and getting the soil ready for your flowers and vegetables are important first steps in growing a successful garden. Time spent in preparation reduces the time you’ll have to spend maintaining and weeding your garden over the course of the growing season.

Tools and Materials

• String and wooden stakes
• Spade
• Herbicide (*optional*)
• Hoe or mattock
• Steel garden rake
• Soil testing sample kit
• Soil amendments, as required
• Garden fork or rototiller

Choose the spot. Vegetable gardens and most flowerbeds require at least 6 hours of full sun each day. Choose a level spot — either natural or terraced — that has well-drained soil, if possible (see Testing Soil Drainage). Thick grass or vigorous weed growth usually indicate soil drainage and nutrient levels that will support healthy garden plants.

Mark the boundaries. Outline the new garden plot with string and stakes, a hose, or a line of powdered limestone.

Eliminate the competition. Remove existing lawn by slicing under the sod with a spade and cutting it into manageable pieces. Add the pieces to your compost or use it to patch bare spots elsewhere. Kill weeds by use of an herbicide, pull them by hand, or chop them with a hoe or mattock and rake them up. If time permits, you can smother grass and weeds with old carpeting or black plastic anchored to the ground. For best results, leave the covering in place for several weeks of hot weather.

Test the soil. Send a sample of garden soil to a private or cooperative extension office soil-testing lab for nutrient and pH analysis. Call the lab or a local garden center for a collection kit and instructions on how to collect the sample. Test results will tell you which minerals and pH amendments your soil needs to grow healthy vegetables and flowers.

Add amendments. Adjust the soil pH — its measure of acidity or alkalinity — by adding ground limestone or sulfur as recommended by the soil test results. Improve the soil fertility, clay soil drainage, and sandy soil water-holding capacity by adding organic material, such as compost, well-rotted livestock manure, or composted fir bark. Apply a 1- to 2-inch layer of organic material over the garden.

Turn the soil. Work the amendments into the top 6 to 12 inches of soil with a rototiller or garden fork. Break up large clods and remove rocks and roots. Work the soil only when it is dry enough to crumble easily after squeezing – never when it is saturated with water.

The best time to eliminate weeds and grass is the season before you plan to plant your garden. You can do it just prior to planting, too, but may have more weeds pop up throughout the growing season.

Do-it-yourself soil test kits work best for detecting the soil pH, but give only a rough idea of the nutrient levels. Professional tests provide more thorough and accurate information and recommendations.

How to Prepare a New Gardening Plot

Getting rid of weeds and making the soil ready for planting is an important phase of setting up a new garden plot. Take note, the amount of time you will spend preparing your new garden plot will determine the amount of time you will require to carry out routine maintenance such as weeding especially during the growing season.

Question is . . . “which is the best way to set up a new garden plot?” In case you don’t know, consider yourself lucky as this is a detailed guide complete with tips to help you set up a new garden plot.

Material and Tools that you Will Need

To be able to set up a new garden plot you will need the following tools and materials for the preparation phase. They include:
• A spade, hoe or mattock.
• Garden rake made of steel.
• Sample kit for testing soil.
• A relatively long piece of string and wooden stakes.
• Herbicide, preferably glyphosate (optional).
• A garden fork or a rototiller.

What follows next is the actual preparation/setting up of the garden plot. It involves:

Choosing the Right Spot

While in the process of choosing the right spot for your garden, bear in mind that plants (vegetables and flowers) require a minimum of 6 hours exposure to sunlight daily. This should guide you in choosing the best spot, somewhere that is fairly leveled and has well-drained soils. Look for a spot that has thick grass growth and vigorous weeds as this normally serves as an indication of well-drained soils and high nutrients levels suitable for a garden set up.

Draw a Boundary and Get Rid of Any Competition From Plant Matter Around

Once you have spotted a potential area, mark the boundaries of the soon-to-be garden plot using the string and stakes. Go ahead to remove all forms of existing lawn using a spade to cut through to the manageable pieces. Add these to your compost heap for later use. Use the herbicide to get rid of weeds or pull them using bare hands with the help of a hoe or mattock in case you don’t have the herbicide.

Carry Out a Soil Test

To be certain that the vegetables or flowers you wish to grow in your garden won’t die as a result of being planted in soils deficient of specific vital nutrients or mineral salts carry out a soil test. Take a soil sample from your plot and send it to a lab for scrutiny by qualified officers who will check for its PH level among other aspects and consequently advise you on how to go about growing healthy vegetable and flowers on that particular soil type.

Make Necessary Amendments and Turn the Soil

Depending on the results of the soil test results you will be able to adjust soil PH accordingly by either raising its acidity or alkalinity or lowering both but only after taking measurements. At this point focus on improving soil fertility, its drainage in case it is clay soil and even adding organic material of between 1 and 2 inches high over the garden. These should include: rotten livestock manure decomposed fir barks etc from the compost heap you prepared earlier on. Incorporate all the added amendments into the soil using the garden fork breaking up any large clods of soil in the process and getting rid of rocks as well as roots from the soil.

Selecting a plot for vegetable growing

Before making your final selection of a new plot it is important to take time to carefully consider several important issues. The plot’s characteristics, as well as the relation to the other plots nearby in order for your plants to receive the best opportunity to grow successfully, are both vitally important.

Those plots that are only maintained on a part-time basis should be steered clear of because a plot nearby that is not well maintained can easily creep into your plot and before you know it the weeds they had are now yours and the perennial weeds are the hardest to get rid of so try and guard against them.

The wind speed and direction is of great importance as well. If there is going to be a lot of winds then fragile vegetable, flowers or fruits cannot be planted around the edges of the plot or even at the plot at all. There are some plants that do better with strong winds since strong winds also will stop certain insects from coming around and causing harm to the plants.

Some crops that do well in wind are both potatoes and carrots. Also, make sure that water is close by and plentiful since it is probably the most essential element to make your plot a successful one with lots of fruits and vegetables.

Shady plots have much more negatives than positives so if you can stay away from a shady one, all the better. Plants need all the sunshine they can get in order to be healthy and produce an abundant about of crop. So, stay away from tall buildings, large trees, high hedges, and shrubs.

Taking a look at the soil quality is another important aspect of choosing your plot. You need to know if it is rocky, hard, dry or been left abandoned and overgrown with nutrient sucking weeds. Soggy soil is not good either since it will be a condition that will hinder the planting of the plants and choosing a soggy one means you may have to put in a drainage system.

The level of security is also important. Is there a lockable gate where your plot is located and a strong fence. Since it would be very hard for you and your family to have all your hard work lost to vandalism so checking the security is an important key.

Useful Gardening Tips

Create enough time in advance to be able to fully engage yourself and any other person helping you in preparing the new garden plot. Always remember that grass and weeds are to be done away with only when the planting season nears. Also, make sure that you are involved in the soil testing processes in any possible way. As a result of this, you have a rough idea of your soil’s nutrient levels which will make it easier for you to practice gardening in that type of soil. In fact, make it a point to consult extensively with professionals as this way the garden plot you are preparing is most likely to turn out as you expect it.

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A rototiller doesn’t necessarily make preparing a vegetable garden easy. Noisy and hard to manipulate, tillers slice through soil — and beneficial earthworms — to create smooth beds and incorporate soil amendments to a uniform depth. Repeated tilling compacts soil beneath the cultivated layer, making it difficult for plants to establish deep roots and disturbing beneficial soil organisms. A garden spade can do the job in an early spring afternoon for a small plot, or with advanced planning, you can let nature take almost all of the sweat-inducing labor out of preparing soil for a vegetable garden of any size.

Double Digging

Clear weeds from your garden rows in early spring. Spread a 2- to 4-inch layer of compost down each weed-free row with a rigid garden rake.

Dig a hole to the depth of the shovel’s blade and about 12 to 18 inches wide — depending on what you plan to grow — at one end of a row. Deposit the soil from the hole at the opposite end of the row and return to the start of the row.

Loosen the soil at the bottom of the hole you just dug with the tines of a garden fork. Push the tines in as far as you can and rock the handle back and forth to loosen the soil without disturbing its layers. Repeat until you’ve loosened all the soil in the bottom of the hole. You can chop the bottom of the hole with the blade of your shovel to loosen the soil if you want to avoid trading implements, but it is not as effective as using the garden fork.

Toss a few handfuls of organic matter — shredded leaves, straw, composted manure or disease-free plant clippings — across the hole.

Dig the next section of the row to the same depth and width with the garden shovel, depositing the soil so that it fills in the hole above the loosened soil. This also helps incorporate the compost into the soil.

Repeat the three preceding steps until you reach the end of the row. Finish by depositing the first pile of soil from the head of the row into the last hole. Repeat the process for as many rows as you plan to plant.

Rake the rows smooth, grading them slightly so that they are rounded on the sides and slope down to the space between the rows.