Soil preparation never ends

My husband removing the top 2-3 inches of soil

February is a time for us to do annual pruning and soil preparations. For soil preparation, my husband and I remove the top few inches of the last years’ garden soil and replenished all the raised beds with new compost for the current years’ garden. This gives the microbes time to break the soil down further before planting in May.

Next we need to add in fresh compost to fill it back up

We also completed another project recently that thankfully doesn't have to be tackled much. All of our raised beds are lined at the bottom with fencing wire (a mixture of chicken wire and other hardware cloth pieces) along with cardboard. We had double layered and even triple layered the fencing when we built these beds years ago. But, in one of our older beds the metal rusted, broke down and was pushed up by some roots, so a gopher got into it this past Fall for the first time in over 8 years!

Hardware cloth is laid down and our dog, Idgie, is inspecting it

We removed all of the soil from that bed, investigated how the gopher got in, and corrected the problem with new hardware cloth fencing and then lined it with cardboard as an extra barrier.

Cardboard on top of hardware cloth as extra barrier

Now all the raised beds have their soil preparations done. The next project we tackled is the irrigation system.

All the raised beds are ready to plant in

Stay tuned!

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