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  Cover the seeds with fine soil and then firm them in with the back of a hoe to make sure that all the seeds are in contact with the soil. Water gently.

  If you're planting long rows of corn, beans, or peas that will be furrow-irrigated (see Chapter 15), fill the furrows with water first and then push the large seeds into the top of raised beds.

  Wide row planting

  You can plant more seeds in less space and get higher yields by using the wide row planting method. (Figure 13-4 compares wide rows and straight single rows.) This method not only saves space but also allows you to concentrate watering, weeding, and fertilizing in a smaller area. Follow these steps for wide row planting:

  1. Choose the location and width of your row, usually 10 to 16 inches wide, and then smooth the soil until it's level.

  You may want to run strings along the outside edges of the row to clearly designate the planting area.

  2. Sprinkle seeds over the entire row — with most crops, try to land the seeds about 1/2 to 1 inch apart (for peas and beans, 1 1/2 to 2 inches).

  Pat the seeds down with the back of a hoe.

  3. Use a rake to lift soil from the side of the row to cover the seeds, and gently smooth the soil covering the seeds to the same depth throughout the row.

  With small seeds like carrots and lettuce, cover the seeds with a thin layer of potting soil. Then pat the potting soil down again to bring the added soil into firm contact with the seeds.

  4. Water the seeds gently.

  Keep the soil moist by gently watering a few times a week or when you see that the top layer of soil is drying out.

  Figure 13-4: Straight single rows versus wide rows.

  Raised bed planting

  Planting raised beds is essentially the same as planting wide rows. To prepare your beds, see Chapter 14. If you don't have permanent beds, mark the dimensions and smooth out the soil. You can broadcast sow (sprinkle by hand) in single rows with a few inches between rows, as shown in Figure 13-5, or you can plant individual seeds at the proper distance apart.

  Figure 13-5: Broadcasting seeds in a raised bed.

  Hill planting

  Plant seeds for vining crops that spread out — such as squash, melons, or cucumbers — in hills or circular groups, as shown in Figure 13-6. Loosen and level the soil in a 1-foot-diameter area, and then plant five to six seeds close together. After the second set of true leaves form, keep the two strongest seedlings (the ones that are the biggest and sport the most leaves) and thin out the remaining seedlings by cutting them with scissors (see the next section for details).

  Figure 13-6: Sow vining crop seeds in hills.

  If your soil is heavy, you may want to plant in a raised hill (also called a mound). The raised soil warms up more quickly than the surrounding soil and drains better. But be careful in midsummer not to let the mound dry out. You can easily construct a soil basin around the mound for watering (see Chapter 15).

  Thinning seedlings in your garden

  Soon after seedlings grow their second set of true leaves, you need to thin them out. Don't neglect this important step; crowded seedlings turn into weak, spindly plants that don't produce well. Separate the plants by hand or with a narrow hoe according to the distances in Chapter 3.

  When you thin plants, either discard the extra seedlings or move them to another part of your garden. Newly transplanted seedlings need extra attention until they get established. Shade them from the hot sun for a day or two and be sure to keep them well watered. Lettuce is one of the easiest vegetables to move when it's small. Root crops such as beets and carrots transplant poorly, as do beans and peas.

  You can thin some crops in stages, with delicious results. Carrots, lettuce, and beets are all good candidates for gradual thinning. If you've ever tasted beet greens cooked up with tender, marble-sized beets still attached, you know what a real treat they are. Start thinning carrot, lettuce, and beet seedlings when they're 1 to 2 inches apart. After the plants grow to 6 to 8 inches tall, pull up every other one and enjoy them. Leave a final 4- to 6-inch spacing for larger plants to develop.

  Chapter 14: Workin' the Dirt

  In This Chapter

  Clearing your garden plot

  Adding the right nutrients and other stuff to your soil

  Mixing your amendments into the soil

  Forming a compost pile

  Properly preparing the soil before planting is an all-important first step toward a bountiful harvest. Don't take shortcuts with your soil. You'll be cheating your plants at their roots, and they won't like it.

  In this chapter, I tell you how to take care of your soil — clean it up, straighten it out, and make it an all-around better place for roots. Remember, good soil makes happy roots, and happy roots mean a healthy garden.

  Razing Your Garden Spot

  After you choose a good sunny spot for your vegetable garden and draw a plan on paper (see Chapter 3 if you haven't done this preparatory work), you need to clean up the area so the soil will be easier to work. You can clear your garden area any time during the year, but the season before planting works best — clear in the fall for spring planting, clear in the spring for summer or fall planting. You can clear the area the day before you plant, but you may have more weed problems later.

  If you already have an established garden, clean up any debris in fall or winter, depending on where you live, and till the ground before planting.

  Here are the basics of initially clearing your garden spot, which I explain in more detail in the sections that follow:

  1. Outline the areas of your garden plot that you want to clear.

  You outline the areas depending on how you want the plots to be shaped. Follow these guidelines:

  • To get your edges straight for a square or rectangular vegetable plot, stretch a string between sticks and mark the line with a trickle of ground white limestone, which is available at garden centers.

  • For a round garden, use a hose or rope to lay out the area, adjusting the position to create a smooth curve.

  • If you want several individual beds separated by permanent paths, outline each bed independently with string, sticks, and limestone so you don't waste time improving soil that you'll never use. But if you think that you may change your garden layout from season to season or year to year, work the entire area within the outline.

  2. Clear the surface by first removing plants, weeds, brush, and rock. If necessary, mow the site to cut back the grass and weeds close to the surface of the soil.

  See the section "Killing weeds and aggressive grasses," for details on removing weeds.

  3. Dig out the roots of small trees and tough weeds with a hoe, shovel, or pick ax.

  4. After the vegetation is manageable, remove any sod.

  See the section "Stripping sod" for details on how to do this.

  Killing weeds and aggressive grasses

  If your garden area contains a lot of perennial weeds — weeds, like quack grass, that come back year after year — or if you need to clear an area of a warm-season lawn composed of vigorous grasses (like Bermuda grass), make sure that you first kill these weeds or grasses. You can pull out or mulch out seedlings (see Chapter 15 for more on mulches and weeding), but many aggressive weeds and turf spread by underground roots as well as seeds; these underground roots can haunt you for eons.

  If you have an existing garden, you have to be diligent about weeding, or you may need to start all over again with tilling and removing as much of the weed's root system as you can.

  You can kill weeds and aggressive grasses two ways:

  Hand dig and sift: For a small garden dig up the earth and carefully sift the soil, removing sod and root parts that may come back next year as weeds (see the tip on sifting compost at the end of this chapter).

  Apply a covering: An easy, chemical-free way to clear your garden is to cover it with clear or black plastic, cardboard, or even old rugs. After a month under these impermeable coverings, existing plants die fro
m the lack of sunlight. You must plan ahead to use this method, and it may not look pretty, but it works like a charm — especially on annual weeds. For perennial weeds, you may need to dig out their roots, too, after applying the plastic.

  You can buy plastic in rolls at hardware stores or home improvement centers; check department stores for old pieces of cardboard and carpet stores for old rugs. Use the thickest plastic or cardboard you can find — it should be at least 2 millimeters, but 4 millimeters is even better.

  Controlling weeds and grasses by applying a covering to your garden area is easy. Just follow these steps:

  1. Spread the covering over your entire garden area, securing the edges with spare rocks, bricks, or boards.

  Let neighboring pieces overlap by several inches so no light can penetrate. If you're using old rugs, place them nap side down.

  2. After a month, remove the covering and strip off any grass or weeds.

  Use a shovel to cut off any grass or weeds at the root level (just below the soil surface). If they aren't too thick, rototill them into the ground.

  3. Wet the area and wait about 10 days for weeds to sprout.

  Leave the covering off; you want weeds to sprout. You should get some growth because you haven't removed weed seeds.

  4. Use a hoe to kill the weeds.

  Hoeing the weeds down is sufficient to kill annual weeds, but if you have perennial weeds, you need to dig out the roots. Check out the National Gardening Association's Weed Library (www.garden.org/weedlibrary) for help identifying the weeds in your garden.

  For an organic approach to killing weeds and building your garden soil, try a no-till layered garden technique (see Figure 14-1). It's like making lasagna. The season before planting, lay down a 3- to 4-sheet-thick layer of black and white newspaper over the garden area. Water the paper to keep it in place. Cover the newspaper with a 6-inch-thick layer of hay or straw. Top that with a 1- to 2-inch-thick layer of compost. By the next planting season, the layers will have killed the grass and most of the annual and perennial weeds in your garden. You can hand pull any tenacious perennial weeds that survived. Earthworms will have munched up much of the newspaper turning it into valuable compost. You can plant your seedlings right into the mulched layers, and they'll grow like weeds (even better).

  Figure 14-1: Creating a no-till layered garden.

  Stripping sod

  If you don't want to try the techniques in the preceding section, you can immediately remove the lawn grass by stripping the sod (grass and roots) before planting. I show you how to clear it away in this section. If your lawn consists of bluegrass and other less-spreading grasses, you can strip the sod without first killing the grass; most lawns in the northern United States consist of these types of grasses. But you should kill weedier grasses, like Bermuda grass, before you strip the sod (see the preceding section for details on killing weedier grass). Stripping sod takes a lot of effort, but it works. Just follow these steps, and have your wheelbarrow or garden cart handy:

  1. Water the area that you want to clear for 15 minutes for each of the 2 days prior to digging up your sod.

  I suggest watering this way because stripping sod is easier when the ground is slightly moist.

  2. Starting at one end of your plot, slip a spade under the grass and slide it under the sod.

  An easier method is to precut the sod into square or rectangular sections and then loosen each section with a spade. Either way, don't dig too deep; you just want to remove the sod and 1 to 2 inches of roots. You also can use a rented sod stripper to cut the sod into rows that you roll up and remove.

  3. Pivot your spade up and let the sod flip off the spade and back onto the ground. Use your spade to slice off the sod section, toss the sod into a wheelbarrow or garden cart, and take it to a compost pile.

  If your sod has healthy grass with few weeds, and you don't want to compost it, use it to patch bare spots in your lawn. Keep it well watered, and it should root and blend in with the existing grasses.

  4. Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until your garden is cleared of sod.

  These steps should clear all the grass in your garden. You'll get new growth only if you have an aggressive grass like Bermuda and don't kill all the roots.

  Analyzing and Improving Your Soil

  After clearing your garden area, you need to take a close look at your soil — give it a good squeeze, have it tested, amend it, and then work it out to make sure it's in shipshape. Good soil gives vegetable roots a balance of all the things they need: moisture, nutrients, and air. And knowing your soil type enables you to counteract problems that you may face when gardening on that piece of land. I explain the basics in the following sections.

  Distinguishing different types of soil

  Three main types of soil exist, with a lot of variations in between. Hard clay is at one end of the spectrum; soft, sandy soil is at the other end; and loam is in the middle. Being familiar with your soil helps you know what to expect when gardening. Clay soil tends to have a lot of natural fertility but is heavy to work with and doesn't drain water well. Sandy soil, on the other hand, drains water well (maybe too well) but doesn't have a lot of natural fertility. Loam, the ideal soil, is somewhere in between the two.

  Here are general characteristics of the three basic types of soil:

  Sandy soil is composed of mostly large mineral particles. Water moves through this soil quickly, taking nutrients with it. Sandy soil is well aerated, quick to dry out and warm up, and often lacks the nutrients that vegetables need.

  Clay soil consists of mainly small particles that cling tightly together and hold water and nutrients. It's slow to dry out and warm up, and has poor aeration, but it's fertile when it can be worked.

  Loam soil is a happy mixture of large and small particles. It's well aerated and drains properly, but it can still hold water and nutrients. This is the soil to have for a great vegetable garden.

  To find out what type of soil you have, grab a handful of moist soil and squeeze it, as shown in Figure 14-2. Then use these guidelines to determine what type of soil you're working with:

  Sandy soil falls apart and doesn't hold together in a ball when you let go. It feels gritty when you rub it between your fingers.

  Clay soil oozes through your fingers as you squeeze it and stays in a slippery wad when you let go. Rubbing clay soil between your fingers feels slippery.

  Loam soil usually stays together after you squeeze it, but it falls apart easily when you poke it with your finger.

  Figure 14-2: Squeeze your soil to find out what type you have.

  If you have sandy or clay soil, don't despair; you can improve your soil and make it more like loam. Check out the section "Adding organic matter (aka the dead stuff)," later in this chapter, for details.

  Testing your soil

  Vegetables are kind of picky about soil chemistry. Too much of this nutrient or too little of that nutrient, and you have problems. If you don't believe me, check out Chapter 4 to see what happens when tomatoes grow in soil that's deficient in calcium; they develop blossom-end rot. Yuck. Sometimes too much of a nutrient, such as nitrogen, causes lots of leaf growth on plants (such as peppers) but few fruits. Getting the levels just right is important for the best harvest.

  In addition to nutrient levels, soil pH also is an important factor in plant growth. The right pH enables vegetables to use nutrients from the soil. Soil is rated on a pH scale, with a pH of 1 being most acidic and a pH of 14 being most alkaline. If your soil's pH isn't within a suitable range, plants can't take up nutrients — like phosphorus and potassium — even if they're present in the soil in high amounts. On the other hand, if the pH is too low, the solubility of certain minerals, such as manganese, may increase to toxic levels.

  Most vegetables grow well in a slightly acidic soil with a pH between 6 and 7. Potatoes, including sweet potatoes, prefer a slightly more acidic soil, in the 5 to 6 range. But in general, if you aim for a soil pH between 6 and 7, your vegetables should grow wel
l.

  The only way to find out whether your soil will be to your vegetables' liking is to test it. Don't worry; analyzing your soil isn't complicated, and you don't need a lab coat. Here are two ways that you can test your soil:

  Use a do-it-yourself kit. This basic pH test measures your soil's acidity and alkalinity and sometimes major nutrient content. Buy a kit at a nursery, follow the instructions, and voilà — you know your soil's pH. However, the test gives you only a rough picture of the pH and nutrient levels in your soil. You may want to know more about your soil.

  Have a soil lab do a test for you. A complete soil test is a good investment because a soil lab can thoroughly analyze your soil. Here's what you can find out from a soil lab's test in addition to the pH level:

  • Your soil's nutrient content. If you know your soil's nutrient content, you can determine how much and what kind of fertilizer to use. In fact, many soil tests tell you exactly how much fertilizer to add; see Chapter 15 for more on fertilizer.

  • Soil problems that are specific to your geographic region. A soil test may help you identify local problems. The soil lab should then give you a recommendation for a type and amount of fertilizer to add to your soil. For example, in dry-summer areas, you may have salty soil; the remedy is to add gypsum, a readily available mineral soil additive.

  Of course, soil labs charge around $20 to $30 for their basic services. Your local Cooperative Extension Service office or a private soil lab can conduct a complete and reliable soil test. To locate a private lab, look in the phone book under soil testing (or search the Internet for soil test labs around the country). You also can ask your Cooperative Extension Service office for recommendations.