Loosening Garden Soil With a Pitchfork

[RyanRVA]

Hello Everyone,

I am fairly new to gardening so please excuse me if this is a dumb question.

I was wounding if its OK to loosen up the soil in the mounds of my already planted vegetable garden using a pitchfork?

I'm not sure if by doing this it my overly disrupt the freshly planted veggies.

Attached is a picture to reference.

Thank you for the advise!

[applestar]

My initial thought was " pitchfork" might be too thin -- but already mounded soil is probably crumbly enough (unless you were thinking of garden fork) what you don't want to do though is disrupt the new roots of the planted crop. If you do as is the usual technique to stab and then tilt/lever up the soil where the roots have already penetrated, you are going to break those roots.

So what I would suggest is to only treat areas that are not planted that way -- I would even do the paths n between or along the edge of the mounds, and if you *think* it is needed, try just stabbing a little way away from the plants -- straight down and straight up. You will still make channels for water and nutrients (and microbes) to go down and earthworms to find passage.