New Garden

     Spring is arriving. I've prepared a small garden area.  The greenhouse is under construction as you can see in the photo.

Greenhouse being built

The pile of fairly fresh compost which will be buried under the soil.

I left cardboard over an area of lawn for a few months.  This killed off most weeds and got the soil much easier to dig.
I then dug up all the weeds and separated them from the soil.  Dug down again, raking all the dirt off to the side of the 3x6ft

Adding a lot of fresh compost below will help block weeds.

Then the heavier soil is added on the pile.

This is sifted compost. It's what I use to plant in.  Basically sift your compost through a metal screen around chicken wire or a bit smaller.  What I get is soft and nutritious(worm filled!) soil. 

I add this on top of the soil after raking it out some.

I then measured it out and raked it out to 2'6" x 5'6". As the soil settles it will expand back out to 3' x 6'

Here is the raked out and ready to plant soil. I was lucky to catch a nice day to plant, it has been raining often.

It's important to water both the plants and the plot heavily before planting.  Roots don't like to be dry especially during the stress of transplanting.  The roots also don't like sun, so dig the holes before taking them out of the 6 packs.

These are the things I am planting now, also a red sail lettuce. (forgot to get pictured)  In our area there is likely to be mild frost for another 2 months.  All of these are frost hardy.  I have found red lettuces to be able to tolerate cold better than green.  There are a few arugula and romaine. The arugula is about to bolt because I wasn't watering often enough. 

Here is the finished garden bed.  I started by spacing the broccoli and Swiss chard further apart then filling in with the lettuce.  The lettuce is sorted by variety with the green lettuce closest to the near plum tree.  This may help deter heavier frost.   Good luck planting all.