Hi, I'm Heidi Rader. I'm with Cooperative Extension Service. I'm here in the
Georgeson Botanical Garden in Fairbanks, Alaska at the
University of Alaska Fairbanks. Today is the spring and we're going to
be talking about what we do in the spring, which is planting your garden and
bed preparation. So, what a lot of people do in the spring is they go rent
the rototiller and they till their soil and turn it all up. That's okay,
especially for a new garden sometimes you need to rototill. But for an
established garden another way to do it is use what's called a broad fork. And
this just gently aerates and loosens the soil but it doesn't turn the soil and
the good thing about that is it keeps some of those microbial communities
intact. It keeps them a lot happier and they do things like break
down nutrients and just keep your soil healthy. So it's best to have a rich
ecosystem of microbes in your soil and not to break it down too much.
First you're going to loosen your soil. Next you're probably going to add some type
of fertilizer. You can... if you're a home gardener you can just sprinkle it on
like this. Sometimes it's easiest to do before you
plant. You can just sprinkle it and then rake it in. At the Cooperative Extension
we always recommend fertilizing based on a soil test. You can use organic or
conventional fertilizer. You want to look for what the numbers say, so this is NPK.
Your nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium numbers. If these numbers are really low,
there there aren't a lot of nutrients in them. The higher numbers the more
nutrients are in your fertilizer so maybe you could say it's a bigger bang
for your buck. But organic fertilizers, the value is the
they're going to release slowly throughout the summer and you get a lot
of trace minerals but usually need to add more than one type of organic
fertilizer. Blood meal, bone meal, and green sand will provide all your
different numbers for you. After you fertilize, I like to add a little bit of
organic matter on top of your bed and it's really important to keep your
seeds moist until they germinate or sprout. Otherwise they're probably going to die.
So this allows you to more easily keep your bed wet. So add a little bit of
organic matter – compost, manure to the top of your bed – composted manure and then
there's a couple different ways to... to plant your seeds. One way that I see
people do it is just in a single row. So this row back here is about a foot wide
and this one's about three foot wide. If you make beds in your garden just one
foot wide, you're going to have a lot of path space in your garden and less
garden space, so I like to use these wider beds. Also some people just
plant a single row of whatever they're growing in the garden
and then you're going to have a bunch of weeds growing here and only a few carrots.
Another way to plant that I like to do
is just spread the seeds out like this and fill up your entire bed and that
crowds out the the weeds and just gives you more vegetables and allows you to
fill up your garden. If you are really precise, you could use something like a
square foot guide and the different holes are for different crops because
some need more space than others and so you can use this to figure out exactly
how far to plant everything. If you do this then you'll do less thinning. If you
plant carrots like I showed you, just spreading them out
you're going to end up doing a lot of thinning later. You also need to buy
bigger seed packets if you're going to plant like that because you won't have
enough seeds in a small packet that you buy from the grocery store. Another thing
you can do is to soak your peas and beans. That's really going to speed up
your germination of your peas and bean seeds. I soaked these for about a day
and that'll probably shave at least a few days off their germination time.
Another thing I did was I inoculated them and this will help them fix a
lot of nitrogen. So it's basically free fertilizer. So those are the some
things to remember when you're planting your garden in the spring and direct
seeding and I hope to see you next week we're going to be talking more about
drip irrigation and some other things about setting up your garden and
planting here in the garden. That's all for today.