Gardeners:  Start Your Engines!

 By Ron Dieter, Sunnyfield Greenhouse & Gardens

Any day now the soil will be right for working and you can fire up the tiller to turn the soil for this year’s garden. It is easy to tell when soil is dry enough to be worked. Grab a handful and work it with your fingers. The soil is too wet if it wads up into a ball rather than crumbling away. Till wet soil and you’ll regret it for the rest of the season. Instead of making a fine textured seed bed, you will have large clods as hard as rock. You’ll never get them broken down. It takes a winter of freezing and thawing to do that. Be patient and wait until the soil moisture is right.

If you’re working up an existing garden plot, give it a once-over with the tiller and add a layer of compost. Till again and you’re ready to plant. If you don’t have compost, get out the rake and clean up around your landscape shrubs. Gather up the leaves and clippings and chop them up with your lawn mower. Spread them over the garden and till them into the soil.

Let’s talk compost for a minute. Those television garden shows and magazine articles make way too big a deal out of managing a compost pile. Sure, you can follow a prescribed formula, adding lime and nutrients and soil to alternating layers of leaves and grass clippings, followed by a regimen of scheduled turning and mixing and checking compost temperatures and all that. You can even buy fancy rotating compost bins that look like cement mixers. If you have the time and patience for that sort of thing, fine. But there is a much simpler way to do this and the results are the same.

In the fall, after you have raked up the leaves and cleared off your garden, use your lawnmower to chop it all up. If you have a bagging attachment you can collect and chop in one easy pass. Spread the chopped leaves over the garden and till them in. That’s it. No piling, turning and mixing. The leaves will compost themselves in the soil over the winter without any effort on your part. Come spring you’ll find soil with a beautiful texture and plenty of water-holding capacity for the summer season. If you try this once, you’ll find that leaves are much too valuable to bag or burn. In fact, you’ll probably take your neighbors’ leaves too. Chopped leaves also make an excellent mulch for the perennial garden.

Now let’s get back to the tilling. If you’re fortunate enough to have one of those rear-tined tillers, the job is easy, except for getting close to structures and into tight spots. The more common front-tined tillers work better in those situations.

If you are tilling a new garden spot with a front-tined tiller, it may be difficult to keep the tiller in the ground. Loosen up the soil first using a garden fork. Push the fork in the ground and pull it back just enough to loosen the soil. Don’t lift it or turn it. Work the whole plot in this manner and then till. The soil will be just loose enough that the tiller will move through it easily without bouncing around.

Converting a lawn area into a garden plot can be a challenge. If you have a place to use the existing sod, peel it off and plant it elsewhere. Otherwise, it’s best to use Roundup to kill the sod a few days before you till the soil.. Whatever you do, don’t till up a grassy spot without first removing or killing the sod. Tilling does not kill sod. It just cuts it into smaller pieces and replants it. You’ll find yourself fighting that grass for a long time (years). Save yourself the grief. This is supposed to be fun, remember?

As soon as the soil can be worked, you can start planting early season crops such as peas, radishes, potatoes, and spinach. Trees and shrubs can be planted early too. So when you see the farm tractors moving out into the fields, fire up that tiller (or grab the spade) and get growing!