Gardening: How to Prepare a Garden Bed to Grow Annuals

It you are interested to know, how to prepare your garden bed for annuals, don't worry it is not a difficult task and you will find it very easy and interesting job. It requires a little art and creativity to have blooms in your garden bed with a variety of colors such as pink, red, orange, purple and yellow. Actually some of the most beautiful flowers that can be grown annually in your garden bed include marigold, rose periwinkles and zinnias. Although these are the best flowers for growing in luxurious flower beds, the life cycle of these flowers is only one year and hence you need to prepare your garden bed every year to grow these charming and beautiful flowers.

Preparation of soil

First of all a soil test should be carried out to ascertain the quality of the soil. You can test it using a home kit or you can take help from a horticulturist of any local nursery also. If some modifications are required in your soil for growing annuals, the chemicals or other ingredients in proper ratio as recommended by the horticulturist should be added to the soil. You should plough the soil a number of times so that it looses its hardness.

I would personally prefer to use my own prepared compost to my garden. It is far better for the soil than the organic fertilizer and at the same time it provides all the essential nutrients required by the plant. Well-rotted compost is also available from local nurseries and it is very cheap.

Further you should also ensure that you select the proper flower that will grow normally under the local climatic conditions. Generally all the annuals need sufficient amount of sunlight and accordingly you should ensure that you choose the particular area of your garden, where these plants get sufficient sunlight.

Planting the annuals

After digging up to 8 -10 inch holes for you plants, you can put the seeds at the recommended distance, however as it is a challenging task and therefore most of the gardeners prefer to grow annuals from transplants. These transplants are easily available from your local nursery and after digging the soil up to 24 inch deep you can plant these into your garden.