Watch as we turn our lawn into a food garden #3

Since last weekend, we have prepped and planted two garden beds. One thing we’ve learned over the last five years is that consistent, small efforts go a long way in the garden.

Soil Prep

After levelling out the two beds, we conditioned the soil with garden lime, potash, and borax. We’re lucky, the soil here is pretty good already and doesn’t need much done to it.

Of course, soil quality can vary dramatically from one place to another. These fact sheets on soil preparation and soil conditioners by ABC’s Gardening Australia is a good starting point to understand what you might need to do to your soil to get it ready to grow veggies.

Planting

We planted broad beans, parsley, chervil, dill, lettuce (green and red), rainbow chard, and radishes.

The lettuce and herbs were planted in blocks – just a section where seeds were scattered throughout.

The chard and radishes were planted in rows.

The broad beans were planted in rows, too, using wire mesh for quick spacing:

We also scattered dill seeds around the broad beans, we’ve found in the past they grow well together and dill is generally good for attracting beneficial bugs. We sometimes use ‘companion planting’, which is the idea that some plants assist each other when grown close together, while some plant combinations antagonise each other.

There isn’t much in the way of scientific evidence for companion planting, but you can’t really go wrong with high diversity in the garden and avoiding plants that will compete too strongly with each other for space or nutrients – and that’s how we approach planning our plant combinations.

If you’d like more basic information on companion planting, you can find it here and a Google search for ‘companion planting chart’ will bring up plenty of results to give you information on the specific combinations that may or may not work.

Mulching

And last, but certainly not least, we covered the beds with a thin layer of sugar can mulch, which helps keep the soil/seeds moist and warm - this will help speed up seed germination.

In the last five days the garden has gone from this:

To this: