Prep veggie garden for summer vegetables (How to start growing vegetables) – Make a vegetable garden
Growing vegetables for beginners. (Beginners guide to starting a vegetable garden.) All vegetables other than sugar snap peas (such as spinach, arugula, and baby bok choy) have been harvested. So, today we begin preparing for summer vegetables. We’ll break down the harvested rows and create new ones.
Use a shovel to break up the old beds and till the soil.
While tilling the soil, if you come across stones or roots, remove them. It’s a simple task, but an important step in preparing the soil for vegetables. (If there are big stones scattered around, vegetable roots have difficulty spreading.)
Finished tilling. The soil wasn’t too hard, so it was easy to cultivate.
Make a vegetable beds (How to start a vegetable garden)
Next is bed making. First, divide the tilled soil into two parts and create pathways between the beds.
Since pathways are needed between adjacent plots, level the soil in that area.
After roughly forming the beds, mix dolomitic lime (garden lime) into the soil. Add 50g (1.8 oz) of dolomitic lime per bed. The size of one bed is 60cm × 120cm (2 feet × 4 feet).
Dolomitic lime (garden lime) is a fertilizer made by crushing minerals into granules. The use of dolomitic lime involves mixing it into the soil to adjust acidity.
After the cultivation of winter vegetables is completed, when we measured the soil with a acidity meter (pH meter), it was below 6.0. Since the soil is leaning towards acidity, we neutralize it with alkaline dolomitic lime. (Adjust the soil pH to around 6.0-6.5.)
The summer vegetables to be grown prefer a soil pH of around 6.0-6.5. To match that, we’ll spread dolomitic lime to adjust the acidity.
Finally, use wooden boards to shape the beds. With this, the soil preparation using dolomitic lime (garden lime) is complete.
For the beds, enclose the sides with wooden boards, and use the soil piled on top to fill in the gaps. This makes it easier to shape the beds.
Smooth the surface of the beds using wooden board. Since it takes about a week for the dolomitic lime (garden lime) to blend into the soil, the subsequent tasks will be done after that.
Following is the video for how-to. English subtitles are available.