Kim Iversen **Disclaimer: This post may include affiliate links, which means we receive a small commission if you buy through the link on our website (at no additional cost to you). Using our affiliate links helps support our blog, which means we can provide you more content that you love.
About the time the Christmas decorations come down here at the Suburban Farmhouse, we start to look forward to spring planting. Here in our Zone 5 climate planting time is still quite a few months away. Fortunately there are a number of activities we can do to prepare for that beautiful day when we can finally transplant the first plant into the ground, and direct sow the first seed. The exact timing of these activities are determined by the Zone you live in, and for those of us living in Wisconsin we can typically start putting out cold hardy plants in mid- to late April, and start seeds directly in the ground mid- to late May.
When to Get Started
When to get started preparing your beds is dependent on several factors. First and foremost is your hardiness zone. Hardiness zones help identify when your average last killing frost and average first killing frost can occur. Here at the Suburban Farmhouse, we’re located in Zone 5a. This means that we can expect our latest spring frost to occur as late as Mother’s Day weekend.
If you’re not certain when your first and last killing frosts are, we suggest checking out the Farmer’s Almanac (https://www.almanac.com/gardening/frostdates#states-and-provinces). They provide a simple tool that allows you to enter your zip code (or postal code if you live in Canada) and the resulting page provides you with all sorts of information – including your altitude. While you’re there, you might want to bookmark the page. You’ll need to know your altitude when it’s time to start canning all the goodies coming out of the garden!
Now that you know your last killing frost date, and have a rough idea of when you can start putting plants in the ground, you know when you should try to have your beds ready by. Don’t panic if the beds are not ready by the last spring frost date. In the 20 plus years we’ve been gardening here at the Suburban Farmhouse, we have yet to be fully ready to plant on Mother’s Day. Sometimes life just gets in the way.
So we know when to have things ready by, but what about when to get started? Simply put, it depends. When to get started is truly driven by good ole’ Mother Nature, and your tolerance for cold. Once you are able to work the soil with a spade or a trowel you can start preparing your garden beds. This, of course, will be much earlier for our friends in the warmer zones further south, and later for those even further north than we are. Often, the soil will be ready for you shortly before your cold crops are ready to be transplanted. (It’s almost like Mother Nature planned it that way!)
The final factor is your calendar. Between family obligations, spring thaw, and ill-timed rainstorms, preparing the gardens for planting can sometimes feel like you’re in need of some divine intervention. We’ve certainly been known to light tiki torches in order to keep working after the sun went down. Be patient…everything will turn out just fine.
Removing the Garden’s Winter Blanket
Every year in the winter we put our vegetable garden to bed, tucking it in for the winter beneath a blanket of mulch. Exactly what we use each year depends on what we have on hand, but follows two hard and fast rules. Rule one: it must be biodegradable. Rule two: it must be easy to remove or dig into the garden. This means we often end up using straw from the bales we use for fall decorating, grass clippings, newspaper, or cardboard. Typically it is a combination of all three.
This mulch helps hold down the number of weeds we have to deal with in the spring and helps the soil retain its moisture. As it breaks down it also provides some nutrients back into the soil.
In the spring we remove the mulch and make use of it in whatever way we can. Excess grass and newspaper get thrown into the compost. Any straw worth reusing is set aside for the potato beds, and the rest is composted as well. Cardboard is stacked up and reused in other areas of the yard if we can. If not, we take it to the local cardboard recycler.
Weeding
No matter how diligent we are, there are ALWAYS weeds. In an attempt to keep them to a minimum we remove any stubborn weeds that have popped up despite the mulch. In past years these have been dug up rather vigorously prior to digging the entire bed. The reason for removing them prior to digging the bed is to reduce the risk of burying them, along with any seeds they may be harboring, deeper into your garden and therefore increasing the number of the little beasts.
This year was different…
To Dig, or Not to Dig?
That is the question we asked ourselves this year. For the past twenty years, we have meticulously double dug all our garden beds prior to planting. To double dig a bed, you start by removing a spade full of dirt and continue to dig a trench. Once the trench is complete, go back and dig a second spade full of dirt to make the trench twice as deep. Continue in the same manner through the entire bed. If soil amendments, such as compost, are needed these would be added during the process of digging the bed. Needless to say, it’s a labor intensive process.
The labor intensiveness can be reduced somewhat by rototilling the soil. We quickly discovered that this is still heavy work, especially with the size of the rototiller that was needed to make a dent in our soil. For the first few years we rented one, which meant we were both dependent upon Mother Nature not drowning us with rain prior to preparing the beds (rototilling in mud is a great way to get nowhere quickly!), but also upon availability of the units at our local rental store. As fate would have it, these things rarely coincided with a time that was convenient for us so we eventually broke down and bought a rototiller a friend was looking to get rid of.
Now we had the tiller, but it was still hard work to lug the thing into the garden area and up into the beds. As we got older I swear that thing got heavier! In addition, after a few seasons we felt it just wasn’t doing the job very well so we went back to digging the garden each year.
Then one day, prior to planting season, I came across Charles Dowding’s YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB1J6siDdmhwah7q0O2WJBg), and watched his “No dig compared to dig, a win for easy and timesaving” video. Needless to say, I was intrigued. To learn that there was a method that could mean less time doing back breaking labor digging our wonderful clay soil, not to mention less time curling up with a heating pad and bottle of ibuprofen in the evening, and more time for bike rides and bonfires felt like I had struck gold.
About the time I came across the video, we had also decided that we truly needed to add some compost to our garden bed this year…not something we’ve done regularly in the past. It quickly became a no brainer to try the no dig method. What this entailed was buying a large load of compost so we could spread an inch or two in each of the garden beds, as well as in the herb garden. In the past we would have dug this into the soil. This year we dumped the wheelbarrow loads, and simply raked it out into a nice even layer. Suddenly what took several days of labor and was impossible to complete if it had rained recently, was done in one evening and rain was no longer a factor. I was already liking this method!
Other benefits we are already seeing with the no dig method include fewer weeds which are easier to pull out, and better moisture retention. One of the key principles of the no dig method is to disturb the soil surface as little as possible. By not digging, you avoid bringing weed seeds to the surface where they will germinate and do their darndest to invade your entire garden. Simply remove what is there at the beginning of the season, rake out your compost, and get ready to plant. Ongoing maintenance is so easy when the soil is in good shape. Simply pull any weeds that are coming up and they pull right out.
We went on a week’s vacation and came back expecting a garden overrun with weeds like in past years. Instead there were very few and they came right up with a little tug. I had the entire vegetable and herb garden weeded in the same evening!
Despite our best efforts with watering, we always end up with cracked soil as the weather heats up. We’ve had some significantly hot weather already this summer and our garden soil has not yet cracked, and it’s retaining the water we put on it instead of rolling off the top and puddling in the surrounding areas. This has more to do with the layer of compost than with digging, but it’s all part of the same gardening method. Our garden is thriving better this year than it has in years past, and I’m convinced it’s because of using the no dig method!
-Kim
