Hopefully you have read the post about creating beds and borders on this site so that you know you have properly prepared your soil. If you’re now ready to plan your bed or border, here goes.

This is not rocket science but does require some thought. First of all, how will the bed or border be viewed? Is it a border alongside the house or another building? Then the only view will be a frontal view. If the border is along a driveway or walkway, the view may be from more than one side. If the bed is an island bed or stand-alone bed, from what point will most people be looking at it? You need to think about these things for obvious reasons – you want your bed or border to look good from any angle from which it might be viewed. A border alongside a building must have the taller plants toward the back, smaller plants in the front and medium plants in the middle. A border along a walkway will be seen from the front and back, so to speak, and must look good on both sides. A stand-alone bed in, say, the middle of the front lawn, must look great from your front window and from the street. So think before you plant.

SEVERE NO-NOS

A common mistake made is not allowing for a plant’s size at maturity. Before you plant. make sure you know how big it will get when it grows up. There’s nothing wrong with crowding plants a bit in a controlled environment like a bed, border or container, but you don’t want something that turns into an impossible to remove monster taking over an entire section of the bed, especially if its a perennial. An overgrown annual will at least have the decency to die at the end of the season and you will have learned a lesson, but a perennial will have to be dug up and moved. Not fun. Also, watch out for plants that can become rampant, like mint. If mint is happy, it will run through the entire area before you can catch it and there are a number of plants like it. Some just spread, some go to seed, but all can become real pain. Do some research, ask at a nursery, call your county extension service if you’re in doubt.

CONDITIONS

You need to group together plants that like the same conditions – soil, sun exposure and watering. Otherwise, some will thrive and some will dive. Don’t put plants that like shade and wet feet together with plants that like sun and drier soil.

If you want a perpetually handsome bed or border, you also need to plan for the seasons. When the spring-bloomers are done with flowering you need to have other plants in the bed that can step in and take over. If you’re doing a perennial bed, it will probably be a few years before the plants reach the point where that’s possible but you can fill in with annuals until then. If you leave a little room, you can put annuals in any bed you’re planning – they can be handy things. But you need to think about color and texture, what will bloom when, will there be ugly bulb die-back to hide – that sort of thing. Your best bet is to sit down with a piece of graph paper and plot out the bed or border – at least the bigger, longer-lasting plants – and look at the height, color and texture combinations to see if you like them. Look at gardening magazines, go to the bookstore and browse through a few of those gardening books with pretty pictures, see what they’ve done and figure out what you like. If the books tell you not to combine red and yellow and you love red and yellow together – go for it. If you look around, you’ll notice Mother Nature doesn’t worry about “grouping” colors and somehow it always looks glorious when she puts on a show, yes?

I’ll continue this discussion in a future post.

So once the soil type and texture are known and you  know what kind of drainage you have and what kind of amendments you’ll need to add – time to get to the actual work. Assemble your tools – spade and fork would be perfect – your amendments and fertilizer and brace yourself.

OH, MY ACHIN’ BACK

The best method for doing this is called double digging or double trenching.  Dig a trench about a spade blade deep and about a foot wide on one side of your plot of ground and pile the dirt to the side away from the plot. Loosen the soil in the bottom of the trench with your spade or fork and dig another trench next to the first one. Put the dirt from the second trench into the first trench, mixing in  your sand and/or organic matter and a good all purpose organic fertilizer – 5-10-10 is a good all around fertilizer. And yes, we will be discussing what those numbers mean.

Continue across the plot digging trenches and filling them – when you get to the last one, fill it with some of the dirt  from the first trench and your amendments and you can go take a nap. Use the left over dirt to fill in holes in your lawn or make mudballs to throw at neighbors you don’t like.

I know this sounds like a lot of work. Hell, it is a lot of work. But you only have to do it once – if you skip this step you’ll be fighting with your soil for all the years to come. Better to do it right the first time. Of course if you already have good soil, none of this is necessary and I’m really jealous.

For borders, which are beds next to buildings, walkways,driveways, etc. this is almost mandatory; for stand-alone beds there’s an easier way. Raised beds or sunken beds. If you don’t already have beds the size you want or you have really yucky dirt or you just want to do it the easy way raised or sunken beds are the best answer. They must be built with a weather resistant wood – NOT pressure treated, that stuff is toxic – like cedar and the lumber can be a bit pricey. If you have any carpentry skills you can do it yourself – you’re just building a simple rectangle (or square). You can also buy kits at many garden centers and from catalogs like Gardener’s Supply Company. Then order the amount of perfect dirt you need or buy some top soil and mix it with sharp sand and compost yourself and voila! – instant flower bed or vegetable patch. For a sunken bed you need to dig out of your dirt a bed the size you want – should be at least two feet deep – and fill it with a good soil mix. This is a great solution unless you live in an area, as I do, where the grass is a stolon grass like bermuda. If I tried this I’d be spending all my time yanking the damned grass out of my sunken bed. If you live where you have turf – lucky you. Some gardeners claim sunken beds are better than raised beds because they aren’t as exposed but I think you should choose which kind you’d like to try.

Remember not to make your bed impossible to work in by not leaving room for you to get around and weed, mulch, harvest, hide out, whatever. With a border, don’t make it so wide you can’t get to the back of the border to do necessary work. Unless you have tiny munchkins to do it for you.