The sun is shining, the temperature calls for a short sleeved t-shirt and the last of the snow piles has finally melted from your garden beds. Is there any better time to be a gardener in Calgary? There’s something truly magical about spring time in the city, with the promise of a vigorous growing season and the opportunity to put all your plans and dreams that you created during the long winter months into action. Before you can take full action, however, you need some garden maintenance and a spring clean up to get your beds spring ready.
A Spring Clean Up
Before you can get to work planting and mulching in your garden beds, you need to perform a full spring clean up. The first and most obvious step here is to clear out any fall and winter debris that is cluttering up your beds. This will include fallen branches and leaves that got buried in the snow piles, as well as any detritus leftover from the fall that you didn’t get to. There is some value in grinding up the leaves and using them as mulch, but if they’ve rotted and become packed together over winter, you’re better simply clearing them out. Once your beds are clear, you will want to cut back or remove entirely any dead foliage, including dead branches on your bushes and sections of plants that just didn’t survive the winter. These block the light and the spring rains from reaching the healthy parts of your plants and serve no purpose for your growing season, so now is the time to get rid of them.
Treat Your Soil
There’s a trend in city gardening to view yourself less as a homestead gardener and more as a microbe rancher. Your job is to create a vibrant and nutritious home for microbes in your soil that will in turn generate minerals and nutrients for your plants to feed on. One of the biggest mindset shifts here is to avoid digging up or turning over your soil, as this spoils the microbial environment and forces all the micro creatures in your soil to start over again. To fertilize your soil effectively, think about it as feeding it from the top down. This means adding compost or organic matter to the top layer of your soil and allowing the microbes to do their work in breaking it down and bringing the beneficial nutrients deeper into the soil. You can promote this by watering effectively (the water not only seeps down to the roots but also brings the minerals with it) and applying small amounts of material every few days.
Fix Your Soil Balance
Over time, the plants that you keep in each bed change the chemical balance of the soil around them. This is why if you plant annual vegetables, it’s a good idea to rotate what you grow in each garden bed so that you don’t end up with unusable soil. Even if you do undertake this practice, it’s always a good idea to test the makeup of each of your garden beds for the levels of phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium, the three main minerals needed for plant health and growth. You can then compare your current levels with suggested optimal levels for the plants that you want to grow, and add speciality fertiliser containing the right balance of minerals into your organic material to bring the levels into the right balance for growth.
Best Practices For Mulching
Nature abhors a vacuum, and nowhere is this more true than in your garden beds. While you want to make sure that there is plenty of space between your plants for growth, nature will find a way of growing something in any sections of exposed soil between. As a gardener, you’ll call these weeds (nature just says something should be growing there and doesn’t care if we like it or not!) and you can spend hours trying to stem the flow of growth. Mulching is your best proactive tool here. Not only does it cover the bare soil making it harder for seeds to plant themselves, but it also helps retain moisture that gets lost due to evaporation during the hot Calgary days. Your mulch should be made from organic material that will break down eventually over time, and you should aim for a light covering that doesn’t bunch up against the plants as you want to give them space and time to grow.
Getting Professional Help
Whether you’re just starting out with a raised bed or two, or you’re into your third decade of homestead style gardening, getting your beds spring ready requires a lot of effort and time. There comes a point at which you will want to get some professional help to get you started and to give you some pointers for better growing. Here at Scoop Cut-N-Shovel, we offer a garden bed maintenance package where for a fixed hourly rate, one of our garden bed experts will work with you on your initial spring clean up, hedge and bush pruning, long term garden bed maintenance and even flower pot design to bring some aesthetic joy to your yard. This can become a long term collaboration or just a one off job to give you a kick start.
Bundle To Save More
Once you’ve got our professional help to get your beds spring ready, you’ll want to know other ways in which Scoop Cut-N-Shovel can help with your year round property maintenance projects. We offer subscription packages for all seasons, including a winter long snow and ice removal service, lawn care and maintenance, and spring and fall clean ups. We also offer a year round dog poop collection service to keep your yard clean and healthy. You can bundle any of these together to save money, and your best bang for you buck is to take advantage of our year round property maintenance package which gives you access to all our services for one low monthly fee.