Home : Outdoors : Garden and yard : Create a new garden

New Garden. Make a garden anywhere

Do you have a patch of soil that is rich with soil but over grown with weeds, trees, shrubs and looks wild there along a patch of woods? This is a great place where you can start a new garden that you can grow a variety of plants and flowers. Before you even start thinking about what types of plants you can grow in this area, in the sun or in the partial shade, you must first think about how you are going to clear this area so you can have a garden to grow!

One thing that you should keep in mind when you are just starting a new garden is that the more effort that you put into clearing the soil and preparing the site the better results you are going to have in this particular garden.

Starting on a new area that has never been cultivated before can be time consuming depending on just how many blackberry bushes; weeds, jagger bushes and similar wild things are growing in this area.

If you have blackberry, raspberries or any other types of bushes that you want to ‘save’ be sure to do this first.  Digging them up and moving them to other areas of your wood lines so they will spread and still produce the berries that you love so much.  Often elderberries are moved because they are difficult to find but gardeners want the space where elderberries are growing. You will need to make sure that you dig through the soil and get as much of all the types of berry roots that are in the area where you want to garden or the bushes will come back again in the next growing season.

While you are digging through the soil digging up all the long roots of the bushes, trees or shrubs that you are pulling out of the way, be sure to get in there and get rid of any rocks that are going to be in the way while you are gardening. We all know how rocks can find their way to the top of our gardens no matter how deep they are planted so taking as many out as you can now will help you out in the long run.

Now that you have many of the roots, and rocks out of the way you most likely are still left with patches of grass or weeds in the area that you will be gardening. Taking a round pointed shovel and attacking these patches of weeds, just like lifting sod, you will find that you can easily dispose of these patches so you are then left with an area that is soil – with no weeds, rocks and no roots from bushes, weeds, and trees. 

One of the first things that you should do while you have all this soil open is to test the soil.  You can find a home soil testing kit in just about any home center where you purchase your gardening supplies. Testing the soil for any lack of or over abundance of any certain nutrient will allow you to ‘fix’ the soil before you start planting anything. If the soil is low in lime but high in magnesium, you might have the perfect plant for this position, but if you don’t, balancing the soil by adding what the test kit says you are lacking will give you many more options in what to plant in this garden.