Show #08/6708. Making A Space Come Alive - From A Tried Garden To An English Cottage Garden

Remove Trees, Add Soil Amendments

Eric explains they spent all of last week getting this ready to plant and it was a lot of work.

They took the trees out otherwise there was not going to be any way to realize an English cottage garden with the trees in place. There were an incredible amount of roots that had to be pulled out, about 25 wheelbarrow loads. Whenever you take a tree out, especially if you're going to be gardening make sure you go to the extra effort of grinding the stump. Otherwise you're just delaying years and years and years of waiting for that thing to naturally rot. After they did that they brought in a little mini excavator and took out all the large shrubs. They needed the excavator to help get all the roots out and to loosen the soil up to where they can actually start prepping it. And soil prep is one of the most important steps for laying the foundation for a garden. Alex agrees it is the most important step, preparing the soil and bed is the best money one can spend. Alex encourages clients to put more money into the prep, then buy plants as they can afford them. And that’s because you can't do it later. Once everything's planted you're kind of stuck with what you've got and a lot of the success that people either do or don't have with their plantings has everything to do with the foundation that you lay. One can see how clean and open the front area is right now. They will have no trouble working the soil. But once the plants are in they’ll be kind of stuck.

Eric brought in a bunch of soil amendments. It had about 70% aged, milled pine bark, 25% cow manure and about 10% sand. He then tilled that in multiple times with a tiller. Tilling the soil allowed him to get out more roots and rocks. The soil amendments went on top of that. He made sure that everything was evenly incorporated so he wouldn't have little patches where it had better drainage or worse drainage. Now it's a very uniform soil and it's ready to plant.