Preparing the soil for your Kitchen Garden

Welcome to Plant a Kitchen Garden.

Behind every successful kitchen garden is a gardener who has spent at least a little time carefully preparing the soil. Whether you are planning on a huge plot, or a few small containers, the theory is relatively the same.


Good soil

Good soil should be about half and half. Meaning about 50% solids - inorganic matter. Mostly this will be comprised of either clay, sand or silt. Most commonly it will be a mixtures of all three. If you are lucky enough to have that combination, you've got Loam - which is considered the ideal. Loam is comprised about approx 20% clay, 40% of both silt and sand.

The other 50% should be made up of organic matter. Anything now dead, that was once living. Things like grass clippings, composted material from you kitchen, such as vegetables. I admit one of the things I love about my garden is being able to feed all the left over vegetable matter back into it the following spring, after a compost cycle. For some reason this particular trait fulfills some odd little need inside me. In a pinch, I confess I've used peat from the garden store, when starting up a new kitchen garden after we had just moved to a new property. It worked perfectly fine, so don't feel you have to have that self made compost in order to get started.


The main goal of having both types of matter in the soil, is to keep the soil porous so that air and water can filter through, and giving plant roots space to develop.

Spring chores!
Every spring before planting your kitchen garden, you should get into the habit of incorporating new organics into your soil, while preparing your vegetable beds, as old organic material does continually break down further, so it's always a good idea to keep adding.

Thank you for visitings plant a kitchen garden.
Happy gardening!