Gardening Advice & Tips for Irish Gardeners

Day Two in the garden and it is time to prepare the garden soil in preparation for sowing seeds and transplanting seedlings later in the month. Last week I began by building & positioning my new raised beds. I choose raised beds because the soil in my garden is shallow, stony and generally poor. Raised beds gave me the option of importing new soil and growing whatever I want.

With 2 raised beds, each 1.5m long, 90cm wide and 1 foot in height, I would have to import a good bit of soil. But the first thing I needed was some good farm yard manure. Farmers will clear out cattle sheds throughout the year and pile up the manure allowing it to breakdown and turn back into soil. Once fully decomposed this manure makes for ideal growing medium with a good mix of nutrients, moisture and air retention. Manure takes at least 6 months to decompose and should not be used before this point.

Manure is known as black gold to us gardeners because really there is nothing better for your plants and your soil. While it isn’t very high in nutrients, it really improves soil condition and encourages worms and other useful insects into your garden.

I brought in about 4 wheelbarrow loads of manure, 2 for each raised bed. Once spread out over the bed it gave me a depth of 4 to 5 inches of manure. Next I added two bags of peat moss and lastly I topped off the beds with regular garden soil. Using a garden fork I mixed these layers together, creating a good balance of compost, soil and manure.

It is important at this point to ensure that you don’t have any stones or weeds in the soil and I would recommend doing a thorough weeding at this point to save on more weeding down the line. However weeds will always grow and one of the drawbacks of using farm yard manure, especially horse manure is that it can hold a lot of seeds of weeds, so weeding will be inevitable over the year.

It's best to fill your raised beds to the very top to get the most out of the bed and to maximise root space. Also the soil will settle down in time and so will shrink. Once the soil was in, I raked it level and covered the raised beds over with a garden cloche. This will help to warm the soil up and will speed up growing conditions and encourage worms and other life into the soil.

In 4 to 6 weeks’ time planting can start on the beds, in that time the soil will settle, the manure should break down further, releasing it's nutrients and the worms will begin burrowing and improving drainage conditions. With the cloche covering the beds soil temperature should be about 3 to 4 degrees warmer than conditions elsewhere in the garden.

So while we wait for spring to arrive and the frosts to pass we can spend our time preparing and sowing seeds indoors and have them ready to plant out when conditions are more suitable