Green Garden Seeding and Sowing, How to Do It

Wide Rows

After preparing the seedbed, run string attached to two stakes across the garden. Line up one edge of a steel garden rake next to the string and drag it the length of the row For a wider row, lay out two strings to the desired width and drag the rake between them.

Broadcast seed in the raked area, slightly closer together than you would in a conventional row. Press into soil with the back of a hoe or rake. With the rake or hoe, pull soil from outside the row to cover the seed. (Use enough soil to make a covering four times the seed’s diameter, or for long seeds, as deep as their length. In clay soil, you can cover a little more sparingly than in sandy soil. ) Tamp again. You can cover a planting of fine seeds with a thin layer of straw to help hold in moisture until germination.

Raised Beds

Using the conventional method, soil preparation for raised beds was a lot of work. It involved double-digging, the contemplation of which would send any lazy gardener to the nearest hammock, plus spading in compost, well-rotted manure, bone meal, wood ashes, and more manure.

There’s an easier way. Start with a well-prepared seedbed, but it needn’t be double-dug. Enrich it with compost, manure, other organic matter or fertilizer. The raised beds can be formed with either hand tools or a tiller with hilling attachment.

Keep it simple with hand tools:

1. Mark the bed with stakes and strings. Dick Raymond suggests sixteen inches as good width. Some gardeners prefer beds three or four feet wide. Make them any convenient length. Walkways can be up to twenty inches wide. (One gardener makes them the width of a bale of hay for efficient mulching of walks.)
2. Use a rake to pull soil from walkway to the top of the bed. Stand in one walkway and draw soil toward you from the opposite walkway. When you have completed one side, repeat the process from the other side.
3. Level the top of the bed with the back of the rake. Sides should slope at a forty-five-degree angle. A lip of soil around the top edge of a new bed will help reduce erosion.

Help from a tiller:

1. Stake out walkways of two tiller widths.
2. Attach furrowing and hilling attachment to the tiller. Set hilling wings to the highest position, so they will push soil upward onto the bed.
3. Hill up beds. Line up the center of the tiller in front of the first stake, point it at the stake at the other end of the bed, and guide tiller directly toward it. Repeat on the other side.
4. Smooth the top of the bed with a rake.

To plant raised beds, broadcast small seeds as you would for a wide row. Larger seeds such as for bush beans or transplants such as cabbage should be spaced the distances recommended for a conventional row, but the spacing should be in a pattern that lets the leaves of mature plants barely touch one another, providing a living mulch.

Square Beds

The first year, till the entire garden space and mix organic matter into it before you lay out the four-foot by four-foot beds with walkways in between. In subsequent years, use hand tools to prepare and plant one four by four block at a time. First, divide it in quarters with string or by drawing in the soil. Then divide each of the four squares you have created into four more squares. Now you have sixteen planting units, each one foot square. Plant the recommended number of seeds or transplants within that one-foot square: sixteen carrots, beets, onions, or radishes nine bush beans or spinach four lettuce, parsley, or Swiss chard one broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, corn, eggplant, or pepper

Summer squash and zucchini, of course, would never make it in a one-foot square. Give them more space. Grow tomatoes and wining crops like cucumbers, winter squash, pole beans, and peas on vertical supports.

Whenever you harvest from a one-foot square, add organic matter, such as compost or well-rotted manure, or fertilizer and dig it in with a trowel. That keeps the soil ready for planting, and preparation is never a major project.

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