Digging In

Perennials

Class 1: Some Perennials Basics
Class 2: Garden Design
Class 3: Putting Pencil to Paper
Class 4: Soil Preparation and Planting
Class 5: Maintaining your Perennial Gardens
Class 6: Troubleshooting

Creating a new bed, especially if it’s currently covered with sod, is hard work. Before you dig in, let’s look as some different ways to approach the task.

Sod. There are pros and cons to stripping the sod before tilling a new perennial bed. Sod includes not only the grass plants themselves, but also the soil clinging to the roots, as well as earthworms and other organisms living there. By stripping off the sod before tilling a new bed, you’re removing valuable topsoil and beneficial organisms.

If you till the sod right into the soil, you incorporate these valuable materials. But you also break the sod into thousands of little chunks, and those near the surface will readily sprout. In no time you’ll re-establish the lawn in your perennial bed!

Here are two approaches that can help.

1. Plan ahead. Cover the area of the new bed with a tarp, layers of newspaper or cardboard, or a sheet of black plastic. After several months, most of the grass underneath will be dead and you can till it in with minimal resprouting. This technique works best if you cover the area in early fall. By spring tilling time, the grass should be dead.

2. Compost it. If you can’t wait that long, go ahead and strip the sod, but don’t discard it -- compost it! You don’t need to do anything fancy, simply pile it in an out of the way corner. In six months or so, the grass plants will have decomposed and you’ll have a pile of rich soil. You can then use this in your garden to return the nutrients that had been stripped off with the sod.

Before you till. Wait to do your rototilling until the soil has dried out from spring rains. A good way to check this is to take a handful of soil and squeeze it into a ball. If water leaks out, it’s too wet to till. Wait a week or two and try again. Tilling wet soil compacts it -- exactly the opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you have stripped the sod, you may need little or no tilling depending on the type of soil and degree of compaction. You may be able to use a garden fork to loosen the topsoil adequately for planting. If you do use a tiller, go easy. Till just enough to break up and loosen the soil, but don’t pulverize it. If you plan to add amendments like lime or compost (see below), make just one or two passes over the garden to loosen the soil. Add the amendments, and do the final tilling.

Rocks. You’ll know when your tiller hits a buried rock -- it will buck and bounce and jump all over the place. Use a shovel to dig out large, but movable, buried rocks. If you come across a huge rock that can’t be moved, you can plant small, shallow-rooted perennials such as columbine over it as long as it’s covered with at least 6" of soil. Don’t worry about picking out all the fist-sized and smaller rocks, unless you really enjoy that sort of thing.

Use a metal-tined rake to smooth the bed, and you’re ready for planting!

Class 4, Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

If you are tilling in sod -- dead or alive -- you’ll need a heavy duty tiller. If the area is large, you may want to hire someone with a tractor-mounted hydraulic tiller. Don’t expect to use a lightweight tiller to cut through sod; it will bounce around and be difficult to control, and won’t dig to the proper depth.

You can also rent a machine to strip off sod, if you choose to go that route.

Planting FAQ #1

I'd like to plant a butterfly garden. What are some good perennials to include?

Answer

Instead of trying to remove large rocks, consider planting a rock garden. Here are some suggestions for low-growing rock garden plants: creeping phlox, creeping thyme, wooly yarrow (Achillea tomentosa), pussytoes (Antennaria dioica), poppy mallow or winecups (Callirhoe involucrata), potentilla, and Veronica spicata.