If you're one of the millions of people who will be starting their first vegetable garden this year, I have two words for you:
Raised beds.
Seriously. All but one of my vegetable beds are raised beds, and they are a joy to work in. The soil is loose and fluffy (because I don't walk on it, EVER) and all it takes to prep my bed for planting in the spring is to give the whole bed a nice topdressing of compost. It takes about five minutes, and I'm ready to plant.
Of course, a raised bed has many advantages beyond not having to do much prep work at the beginning of the season. The soil dries out quicker in spring, and it warms faster than regular garden beds. It is easy to plan and organize my garden each year and keep track of things like crop rotation, because I just move things from bed to bed each year. As an added bonus, I can sit right on the wood frame of the raised bed and weed or harvest.
Raised beds are simple to make, and I can just about guarantee that once you start gardening in a raised bed, you'll consider it the only way to grow. It takes less than an hour to construct a raised bed, and, once filled, it's ready to plant. Of course, you don't have to construct anything at all if you don't want to; you can simply make a mound of soil and other organic amendments and go ahead and plant in it. Whichever way you choose, you'll be gardening in no time, without all of the backbreaking work of sod busting and double digging.
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