Spring is almost here, and that means its’ time to think about planting your spring garden. Whether this is your first garden or you are an old hand at gardening, we have some handy steps you can take to help your garden flourish.
Know Your Region’s Growing Season
In each region there’s a zone that’s used by gardeners as to when particular kinds of vegetables should be grown. The regions that are warmer will have a longer and different growing season when compared with colder climates. But you want to know is the first and the last date of frost.
If you plant before the date, you may lose your seedlings. There are plants that can survive frost. However, basil, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes and others won’t. if you choose frost-hardy plants, you can plant them in a fall or early spring garden.
Choose Containers or Raised Beds
If you have a section of your deck or yard that gets a minimum of six hours of sun each day, then you can start a container or raised bed garden and grow just about anything.
Raised beds can be either simple or complicated. If there isn’t enough yard space, a lot of vegetables can be grown inside containers. Just keep in mind that you’ll have to water container gardens a lot more than the raised bed ones. Look at the package on the seeds to see if it can be grown in a container.
Prepare Your Soil
The soil’s the key to healthy and delicious vegetables, so you want to make sure that you’re doing this step. With containers and raised beds, you are going to have a lot more control over the quality of your soil. The reason is because you are putting the nutrients into it. It’s suggested by some experts that you take the ingredients below and make a mixture of them.
- 1/3 horticultural vermiculite (coarse)
- 1/3 peat moss
- 1/3 blended compost
Alternatively, you can do half high-quality compost and half screened topsoil.
You can go to your local gardening store and they will be happy to answer your questions and point you in the right direction.
Protect Your Garden
When you are beginning a garden, you want to make sure that you are protecting it so that you can eat the fruit of your labors rather than your furry friends. It’s a good idea to put chicken wire around the garden and put covers overtop of it. You also can put bird netting on top of high stakes so that unwanted visitors are kept out.
Buy Your Transplants
This is the part that is a lot of fun. Since you might have a short growing season depending on where in Massachusetts you live, you might want to buy transplants. This will help you with getting a start on your growing season.
Choose your favorite veggies. You want to start out with a few and learn the way that each of them grows. It’s always possible to expand next year.
Start Planning Your Garden
When you’re planning your raised beds, it’s a good idea to use something called square foot. This will make the process simple by breaking the beds down into areas of one square foot. Each will get a particular plant, and you can put so many in that foot based on the plant. For instance, you put tomato in one foot and nine spinach plants inside another square.
You can use anything from twine to sticks for marking your squares. Some of them will have a single seedling while others have multiple.
Begin to Plant
After you have your plants home, they’re going to need some special care. If you aren’t ready to plant them just yet, put them into a shady spot outside and protect them from pests.
The best time that you want to plant the seedlings is on a day that is cloudy and calm, or during the afternoon. This means that the sun’s not going to be as hot. The day prior to planting, water your plants so that their soil’s moist. You also want to make sure the soil in the garden’s moist, but that it isn’t too wet. When you have muddy soil, you want to wait for it to be drier.
These are 7 steps that you can take to plant your garden in Massachusetts. When you do it well, you are going to have delicious home grown vegetables to enjoy.
