In the last post we made our battle plan for your Victory Garden.  This week it’s time to PREPARE FOR BATTLE! … Ur um. Till up your garden.  So if you’re an experienced gardener with a plot or raised beds already prepared, this is pretty easy.  However, what if you’re just starting with a patch of grass?  We’re going to go old school for this one.  (I’m literally pulling information from a WWII gardening pamphlet.)

We know that most people with small gardens do not have a tiller or tractor at their disposal.  However, if five or six people in your community are going to have Victory Gardens, it might be worth it to rent a tiller or hire a local farmer to till your garden patch.  I was pleased to see freshly tilled garden patches popping up in yards on my way home this week. — Seriously, Clifton, WV is on top of this! — However, if you want to go the manual route, it takes a bit more work, but we could all use some extra exercise right now.

You can till your garden as soon as the ground thaws in the spring, but in our area, water and soil consistency is a big factor.  In a soil with a higher clay content, you might have to wait longer before you can till.  When you squeeze a handful of soil it should form a ball that crumbles easily.  If it is muddy or doesn’t break do no digging.  Digging in wet soil will compact it and when it does dry, the clods will be as hard as bricks.

There are two methods for digging up your garden plot depending on the quality of your soil.  The only difference is the depth of digging.  For good upper layer of soil, single digging is usually sufficient.  For poorer soils, double digging might be needed, but the process is basically the same.  First, dig a trench along one end of your plot, hauling that soil to the far end of the plot.  Then it is just a matter of digging a new trench beside the first trench and filling in the first.  When filling it in, you want to flip the soil.  If double digging, your first trench will be two shovels deep, and the top layer from the second trench will make the bottom layer for the first.  That way you get maximum soil mixing.

After your initial pass over the garden plot, go back with a garden fork to start loosening the soil more and breaking work the larger chunks.  This is also an excellent time to find and remove any rocks that you managed to miss while shoveling.  Finally, use a good, metal rake to further break up the top layers and smooth out the area.  Use both the tines and the back of the rake to smooth the area.

If you’re starting with a plot of grass, you can either strip up the sod layer or turn it under to add nutrient back to the soil.  However, this will sometimes lead to some stray grass clumps popping up during the first few seasons.  Also, after the first tilling, let the garden “rest” for a week or two to let freshly tilled plant material die and weeds start to sprout.  Then till up the top 3 to 4 inches again with a garden rake or tiller when the top layer is fairly dry.  This will kill new weed growth and also create a fine, powdery soil for planting.

Something that we haven’t covered is fertilizers.  For a new, untested garden plot, I recommend using a liquid fertilizer like Jack’s Classic directly on the plants.  You might be tempted to pour on fertilizers like sodium nitrate to treat the entire garden, but you might do more harm than good.  The same goes for lime.  Lime is only needed for acidic soils.   You can easily test you garden’s pH using a litmus paper test strip.  If your soil is acidic, you can use agricultural lime sparingly, tilling it into the top layer.  In the fall you can send a soil sample out to be tested through your state’s extension service.  Here in West Virginia, soil testing is free through the WVU Extension.

Now that we’ve prepared the battlefield, it’s time to start planting.  In our next post, we’re going to take a look at how to optimize your garden and get the most out of your seeds and starts.  Now is the time to start buying seeds and planning what you want to grow from starts.

Tilling up a garden plot is a process that translates from a large area down to a small flower bed. In the video below you can see the process from grass to finished flower bed.