Preparing Your Garden's Soil for the New Gardening Season!

The most delicious produce often comes from our own gardens. To make sure our seeds get a healthy start, we have to prepare our soil for use. Read more about getting your soil ready for use here.

If you know exactly where and how your produce grows best, this knowledge will soon be reflected in its flavor. Get the best food quality out of your garden with these tips!

Gardening at home is a trend that is on the rise! Raised beds are becoming increasingly popular and urban gardening has made a name for itself all over the world. In addition, more and more parents want to show their children where their food came from. All of these trends reflect a growing desire for a higher quality of produce and overall life in cities and rural areas. Gardening has a calming effect, plus who doesn't love the visual and culinary benefits?

Here are the most important tips for preparing your garden:

Loosen the soil:

In March, the gardening season begins. To get started, make sure to loosen the soil you're planting in to allow the helpful animals, nutrients and microorganisms to development. Loose and healthy soil allows for more nutrients for our plants. In addition, plants growing in hard ground grow slowly, and the risk of waterlogging is high. Loosening your soil prevents this.

Note: The reason that the garden season begins in the spring and not in late autumn is simple. If we disturb the soil in the autumn, it bothers the animals and organisms living underground and means they may not survive through the winter. In autumn it is better to prepare your garden with green manure is. This improves the quality of the soil and enriches it with nitrogen, which microorganisms love.

Remove weeds:

When loosening the soil, pick out any weeds. They take away nutrients and water that our crops could need, causing a reduced yield.

Fertilize:

Fertilize your soil preferably with an organic fertilizer or compost. When you use fertilizers, plants take in a lot of dissolved nutrients at once. This accelerates growth, but unfortunately also increases susceptibility to pests and diseases.

Organisms living in your soil often have problems with artificial fertilizers. Artificial soils also have an environmental impact, because excess nutrients get into our groundwater.

Using compost or other forms of organic fertilizers makes sure that a healthy level of nutrients is available for your plants, keeping them fit.

Check the pH level of the soil:

Spring is also a good time to check the pH of the soil. A neutral value of 7 is best. When the value is below or above this number, it reduces the yield of your crops.

At a value under 6.5, your soil is acidic. Treatment with lime or basalt powder can help.

At a value of about 7.5, your soil is alkaline. In this case you should use peat or granite meal to bring the soil back into balance.

If your pH values are off it is best to consult expert advice so that everything goes smoothly.

We wish you a beautiful garden season in 2017 and hope you have a wonderfully abundant harvest!