What you Should Never do in your Garden!

Why You Should Always Avoid Wet Soil

A bounty of snowfall followed by a warm sunny day has this gardener itching at the bit to get outside and play in the dirt.  A nice wet Spring usually makes for excellent gardening all year, but this is the one time you can ruin your garden, harming it sometimes for years. Don’t let Spring Fever lead you to destroy your soil and do what you should never do in your garden!!

Never dig in your garden when the soil is wet.  If clumps of clay are sticking to your boots….it’s too wet.

Don’t dig wet soil.

Don’t rototill wet soil.

Don’t walk on wet garden soil.

Just stay away.

The key to happy plants and happy roots is air in the soil. When you dig in wet soil (unless you are growing in sand) you create clods of compressed soil that stick to your shoes like glue and turn into big chunks of virtual concrete when it dries. It could be years until you get good soil texture again. You can’t easily turn the clods back into good soil.  Hitting it with a shovel when dry (the voice of experience speaks loudly here) just turns the soil into dust.

So start some seeds, prune some trees if they are still dormant, sharpen your tools, but the most important thing to do on a wet Spring day is to stay out of the garden soil!