How to Till a GardenYou’ll need to learn how to till a garden if you want to give your plants the best possible start before planting them! Tilling the soil before planting flowers or vegetables not only softens the soil so it is ready for planting, but it stirs up the nutrients in the soil forcing more of the “good stuff” to the top where it can be available to your newly planted babies.
I’ll address each method of how to till a garden – with regular ‘ol archaic lanw and garden tools like a shovel and garden rake, or with the sophisticated help of a garden tiller. How to till a garden with a garden tiller – Step 1:I’m going to assume that we’re all starting with a pre-established garden bed – meaning a specific bare spot in your yard, ready and waiting for fruits and vegetables. If you’re just sectioning off a spot on the grass, you’ll need to kill the grass before you can proceed. The best way to do this if you have time is to place a heavy tarp over the area, and anchor it down with several rocks or pavers. You’ll need to leave that tarp there for several weeks to make sure the grass is dead. You can always spray the area with grass and weed killer to move a bit faster, but the problem with that is that you wouldn’t want the agents from that chemical in the soil of your garden where you’ll be planting food that you and your family will eat. When working in your garden, it’s best to keep things as organic as possible. You could decide to till the grass into the soil, but I have found that you’ll have problems with grass spreading in the garden area if you do it this way.So, for those of you starting with a bare spot, the first step is to remove the weeds and/or stray grass that has crept into the area during the off season. You can skip this step if you’re daring, and simply till the weeds into the soil, but I wouldn’t recommend that – that’ll just leave you with a whole lot of weed seeds in your garden which will quickly establish themselves amongst your plants, and keep you busy weeding all summer long. I prefer to use a pitchfork by pushing it into the soil the way you would a shovel, and lifting up the entire weed, root and all. Shake off the excess dirt, and place the weed in your bin for yard waste removal by your city or village. Do this until all of the large weeds are removed – you don’t need to bother with the really small weeds – my barometer is if the weed is larger than about 2 inches tall or across, I remove it. How to till a garden with a garden tiller – Step 2:Till away! If you don’t have a garden tiller, you have a couple of options – you can either rent one (I found one for like $16 an hour at the hardware store around the corner) or you can do it old school with the easy, but somewhat labor intensive steps that follow. Run your tiller over the entire garden until you have turned the soil to a depth of about 4-6 inches. That will give you plenty of depth to plant your veggies, and should sufficiently stir up the nutrients in the soil.How to till a garden with a garden tiller – Step 3:Use a garden rake to smooth out the soil that you’ve just tilled, and you’re ready to go! Lay out your plants, and get those babies in the ground while the soil is nice and soft.Now for you archaic folk (which I was one of this year), let’s talk about the cheap way to do this. How to till a garden manually – Step 1:Follow the same info as listed above in Step 1.How to till a garden manually – Step 2:Once you’ve removed any weeds, you’ll need to take a garden shovel and turn over the soil shovel by shovel until you make your way across the entire surface of the garden. This is a step that you should actually do at the END of the garden season before the cold weather hits. This steps helps the soil to naturally break down and regenerate itself throughout the winter months so it’s ready to be worked in spring. If you failed to do this at the close of last season (which unfortunately applies to me this year) it is sufficient to do it now.How to till a garden manually – Step 3:Once you’ve turned over all that soil, you’ll probably be left with large “clumps” of soil throughout the garden. You’ll need to soften that soil so it can be raked smooth when you’re done. This can be a bit tricky depending on how hard the soil is. You can try and use a device like the Garden Weasel that actually turns the soil manually, although if the soils is particularly hard, that won’t work. The other thing that you can do is to take your garden rake and turn the soil chunk by chunk until it breaks down. I’ve also used the flat side of my garden rake to help break up these chunks bit by bit.If you are gardening regularly, these tools should work fine, however if your soil is hard, quite frankly I would recommend renting a garden tiller. It’s relatively cheap and makes the work so much easier. Personally, I don’t recommend buying a garden tiller as it is not a tool that most people use frequently, and with the ownership of any garden equipment, comes the time and expense of maintaining it. How to till a garden manually – Step 4:Same as Step 3 above – rake the area until it’s nice and smooth, and plant your plants immediately.That’s about it! Not a difficult thing to do, but something that will have an amazing impact on your garden plants. Planting in soil that is hard and compact will not allow room for the new root system to develop. Stirring the soil makes the soil more easy to penetrate, and therefore gives the root system a way to establish itself. Good luck to you in your garden adventure!
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