Flower Beds

[julie1948]

I am interested in planting flowers in my yard but I want them in a mound of dirt like landscapers. The soil in our area is poor: Georgia clay. I need to know how to do it and what to buy.

[rainbowgardener]

Hi and welcome to the forum! Glad you found us. I took the liberty of moving your post to flower gardening, since that was your question. More people will see it here that can answer your question; not everyone reads the intros.

In the meantime, check out this thread:

https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24090&highlight=

this was about turning lawn into veggie gardens, but the same newspaper method would work for starting a flower bed (and in fact that was the example I was using).

So what you need is some kind of edging - landscape timbers, blocks, fencing, etc. The point of that is that once you have built up your mound, you don't want it to just wash away again in the first rain.

Then you need a mixture of good topsoil, compost, and peat moss to build your mound out of.

[uniquegardenplants]

I landscape in the same thick red clay so I feel your pain. Our heavy clay soil is actually not so bad...it holds nutrients really well which is good...but it doesn't drain well...which is bad. The drainage can be fixed though. Most important thing to do if you do nothing else is to rototill the area to as deep as your tiller will go in order to break up compaction. Spend the money to bring in some nice screened and blended topsoil from a bulk materials yard and build up your beds up another 8-12" if possible. Rent a bed edger and notch out your bed edges (or use a shovel, but this is tough and often looks uneven). This will prevent the soil and mulch from spilling into your grass as RainbowGardener had mentioned.

Once the beds are built up nice and fluffy, digging will be a breeze and your plants will take off! Don't forget to mulch after planting....a nice double shredded hardwood mulch looks nice... no more than 3" thick. Got to spend most of your time and money on soil preparation, everything else is secondary.

[MaineDesigner]

Even small changes in grade can make a significant change in drainage. I'm broadly in agreement with the advice from uniquegarden plants with some caveats as noted below. I would start with getting a soil test of the existing parent soil. If you are deficient in nutrients, especially those that are fairly stable in the soil, now is the time to add them. I would then till organic material into the existing soil. I usually use good quality compost but there are alternatives and other additions we can get into if need be. Add a topsoil and compost mix (without knowing what your available topsoil is like I can't give you a specific ratio) to create a bermed/raised bed of the desired height. Many homeowners and some nominal professionals create beds that are too shallow in depth. For beds of herbaceous plants I like a minimum depth of six feet but more is usually better. Mixed beds with woody and herbaceous plants require more depth, probably on the order of ten feet or more. A good rule of thumb for a rise:run ratio in bermed beds is no more than three inches of rise (I usually use 1.5" - 2") for every foot of run (more rapid elevation gains usually look awkward and moisture may run off too quickly). If you created a bed that was eight feet deep I would probably aim for a maximum elevation gain above the surrounding grade of six to eight inches and not continue the rise all the way to the center or the bed I.e. the top of the bed would be flat or flat-ish near the center. I place large flat stones in the bed to give you a place to move or perch when doing maintenance. Unless you are some sort of tai chi master you need to make maintenance access provisions in deep beds.

If you added material, and thoroughly rototilled the existing soil under your bed, the berm is probably initially going to be too fluffy so the height you start with is probably going to be slightly higher than the final settled height of the berm. All that oxygen and airspace you till into the soil is also going to accelerate the breakdown of organic material, one of many reasons that I'm not a huge fan of rototilling, but in this situation you need to till or at least work the soil with a fork so that there is not an abrupt transition from the berm to the soil below.

New beds usually have quite a bit of blank space for the first two or three years. I often use newspaper under the top mulch, six to ten sheets thick, to help insure that weeds won't colonize this open space while your garden plants are growing and expanding. The newspaper will break down and disappear in a couple years but by then your plants should be established.

[tomf]

I think adding sand and organics would help your soil and that would help your flowers grow.