Cultivating Soil

What does it mean to cultivate your garden? You are simply making the soil better. If you walked into your backyard right now, I’m sure you wouldn’t just throw some tomato seeds on the grass and expect plump tomatoes in a couple months by doing nothing else.

When you cultivate the soil, you prepare it for the plants you are going to grow. To begin, let’s assume you are just starting a garden and only have your grassy yard. Ideally, you will use a motorized tiller. A tiller takes all the hard work out of cultivating your garden. You just turn it on and push it across your garden. It will break up all the grass and ground for you.

A tiller is ideal because it is so easy, but they can be expensive. If you are lucky, you can borrow one from someone. If you are serious about gardening and know that you might use it a least every couple of years and have a large garden, it would be worth buying one.

If you don’t have access to a tiller, don’t worry, cultivating your garden is not impossible. First, you will need a shovel and maybe a pickax. At the very least you will need a shovel to begin with. Use the shovel to trace out your garden plot and dig up all the grass. I prefer to remove the grass and add it to my compost so that the garden plot has room to add new fresh soil.

If the grass is really tough, you can use a pickax to help break it up. Once you’ve removed all the grass, you can further use the pickax to break up all the large clumps. Once you’ve got most of the large tough stuff broken up, you can move on to using the garden hoe. A garden hoe has a small plate on the end that you can use to chop up your soil and dirt.

A garden cultivator will then be necessary to finish chopping and breaking up all the rest of the clumps in the soil. It will also be necessary to rake out all the rocks and roots left in your soil.

Once your garden plot is cultivated, you can fertilize it and start planting. Watch your plants grow and continue to cultivate your garden by keeping the soil in between your plants broken up. This way, your soil will drain well and your plants will grow their best.