Dining and Cooking
Making my first front yard garden bed
In Vegetable Gardening

Making my first front yard garden bed

I just wanted to share some progress on my first garden bed! I originally planned for raised beds but seeing the price of lumber in my area It pushed me to go for in-ground. Im currently working on incorporating rich garden soil mixed with coco peat, rice hulls, vermicast and compost to my native clay soil. Along with the garden soil, I decided to get a pickaxe and use it as a make-shift broadfork to break up the compacted clay layer atleast 6-8 inches underneath and it worked out pretty well! Any suggestions and advice is appreciated.

by Trxxck

5 Comments

  2. mcglash

    You made the right choice. Looks great. What are you going to sow, plant, grow?

  3. quassels

    We have heavy clay soil too, it’s actually why I made some raised beds and started gardening 25 years ago (back then my kids were little and the ground on sunniest part of our garden was so hard that they didn’t like playing there so we decided to make some use of that area and introduce them to gardening). I am thinking an artichoke plant might work well in the back part of you bed, they aren’t annuals so their roots might help bore through clay long term, they also have decorative leaves,, produce more over the years if kept healthy (aphids can become a problem, I wipe and hose them off and introduce ladybug larvae to the plants, if you let them flower they too are very interesting (like giant purple thistles). You can plant a couple of sunflowers along the back too, to attract pollinators…just be sure to buy the seeds for ones that do that, there are sunflowers made for the floral industry (they don’t make much pollen, less messy for arrangements but not good for small bed gardeners). Scatter some marigold (tagetes) along front and side borders…they act as slug/snail traps if you have issues with that.