How to Create a Garden Bed Video

Spring Hill Nursery's gardening expert demonstrates how to create a garden bed in a few simple steps. Learn what tools and supplies to use, how and how deep to dig and all else you need to know to create a bed that offers a healthy foundation to your favorite perennial plants.

Hi and welcome to Spring Hill Nursery's step-by-step gardening. I'm your host Scott Atkinson and today, we're going from grass to garden. With just a few simple tools and a few easy steps, I'll show you how to get rid of the sod and put in the blooms. It's real easy! So, to prep, all you need is a spot where you want to put your garden and a few simple tools - a shovel to dig the sod, and if you're going to have a large section, you can use a sod stripper, but we're just going to do a small bed today. We need some water, need a tarp, and I'm going to show you how to use this later, we're going to take the soil out of the hole and mix it up to really get the best soil mix possible. You need some fertilizer. I'm going to use my Spring Hill Nursery's plant food, and then you need something to mix all that soil up. I like to use a garden hoe. You can use a rake, whatever! Alright, let's look at the site. So, the process is simple and you can use this for a large space or a small space. Today, we're just going to use a small space. I'm going to plant a nice strip here, flowers for border, just along this edging here to my garden path. What I'm going to do, is I'm going to get rid of the top soil and then I'm going to use a process called double digging. I'll show you to do that and we're going to get the best soil mix by using that method. So, the first thing we're going to do is get rid of the sod. Now you can take this and you can either throw it in the compost pile, or you can use it to patch up other parts of your lawn. That's what I do, it's a real nice filler. It's got good root system here. Now I'm using a pointed shovel right now, but to clean up the edges of your border, you should end up using a flat shovel to get a nice straight edge. I've removed all the sod and later today, we'll go, take it out and patch up the yard a little bit. Now we're going to do double digging and the whole point of this is to get the best soil foundation we can for the perennials. First thing we're going to do is we're going to dig down a spade's depth with our shovel here, top soil, and then we're going to throw it onto this tarp. That way, we separate it from the sod and from the sub-soil that we're going to dig later. So, we're going to dig out few inches here from the whole hole, the whole planting bed. Top soil, see how good that is? Throw all that here. Dug out all the top soil. Now the second step in double digging is to dig out what we call the sub-soil and that is the second layer down here, okay? We're going to really go deep here, really go two spades deep. First spade is top soil and second is the sub-soil and we're also going to put this on our tarp, but we're going to put it on a separate section to keep it away from the top soil. We've dug our second level of soil, the sub-soil and we've made two piles of soil on this tarp. Now it's time to add our soil conditioner. It could be peat moss, leaf mold or good old garden compost which is what I'm going to use. See this, now this is good, nice, dark, rich and full of nutrients. We're going to add equal amounts of the garden compost to your piles of sub-soil and top soil and then we're going to put them in our hole. I've mixed the compost evenly into my levels of soil and put in some fertilizer and now it's time to fill the hole. The key to double digging is putting the top soil in first. That's going to allow your bed to really have a great foundation. So, what I'm doing now, is putting in the sub-soil. All the top soil went in, now the sub-soil. So, we've gone from grass to garden in just a few easy steps. Now we have this nice great soil that's going to give our perennials a great start. For Spring Hill Nursery, I'm Scott Atkinson with step-by-step gardening.