How to Prepare a Flower Bed
If you want to learn how to prepare a flower bed, our detailed guide can help teach you how. Building a flower bed comes with many benefits. It doesn’t only allow you to grow small plots of vegetables and flowers. It also creates an environment that promotes healthy growth – maintaining a pathway for seeds from the soil, preventing soil compaction, and even facilitating proper drainage. Plus, preparing a flower bed by yourself allows you to save more. So, below, we’ve shared a foolproof and clear guide on how to prepare a flower bed in your garden.
Tools and materials needed
Before you start building your flower bed, you will need to line up the right tools and materials needed for the task. These include:
Gardening gloves
Garden trowel – a shovel with a flat, pointed blade
Weed killer
Rake
Shovel
Homemade compost
Garden hose (in case you need to moisten the soil)
Wheelbarrow or large bin
How to Clear a Flower Bed: Step by Step
This process normally involves the cleaning out and redesigning of a flower bed. The main purpose of this process is to create a fertile and healthy environment for growing your flowers and vegetables. This means that you will work towards enhancing soil fertility and drainage. The steps below offer an in-depth guide on how to clear a flower bed.
Pull out the weeds
Start by clearing out the flower bed to create space for new plants. To do so, you want to use a garden trowel to dig out the roots of weeds. Taller weeds and other unwanted debris can easily be pulled out by hand.
Clear existing plants
When you are done removing roots and debris, the next step is to remove unwanted plants. If you are still attached to some of your plants and flowers, you can remove them for the time being and save them for later replanting. This allows you to properly plan out how you want your flower bed to look. After removing all the plants, treat the soil with a weed killer. Always use a seed-friendly weed killer to ensure it doesn’t interfere with the growth of any of your plants.
Prepare the ground
The next step after clearing the existing flower bed is to rake through the soil and prepare it for composting. The purpose of the raking process is to ensure the soil is smooth – removing any rocks or gravel. You can remove some of the rocks and debris that the rake missed out using your hands. When the ground is sufficiently cleared and smoothened, add a layer of compost to the flower bed to enrich the soil, the layer can measure anywhere between 2 and 3 inches.
Before applying the compost, make sure the soil is moist enough. Then, mix the compost with the soil to at least foot deep to ensure optimal enrichment. In addition to compost, you can even add extra organic matter such as manure, peat, and leaf mold to ensure your soil receives maximum nutrients.
Remove any waste you create
During the preparation process, you would’ve accumulated a lot of waste. This includes the weeds, debris, and plants you pulled out of the flower bed. You want to clear out all these wastes from the flower bed using a wheelbarrow or large outdoor bin to ensure you leave the flower bed clean and neat.
Redesign the flower bed
This is perhaps the most fun part about preparing a flower bed. This is where you bring your creativity into action. If you have space, try to make your flower bed at least 6 feet wide for a better and more aesthetically pleasing presentation of your flowers and vegetables. You can even landscape the flower beds with sharp corners and curves for a more distinctive look.
Before you start to plant your flowers and vegetables, create a rough sketch or skeleton of how you want to arrange them and think of factors such as how they will receive adequate sunlight.
Start by planning the focal points which include trees and large plants, then, work your way done to hedges, decorative plants, vegetables, and flowers. You can even include the plants you pulled out earlier in the plan to figure out where you will replant them to ensure they continue to thrive.
