Amelia Barker
About AuthorMarch 2, 2025
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GardeningSpring Soil Preparation: How to Get Your Raised Beds Ready for Vegetable Planting
Spring is around the corner in Portland and soon it will be time to plant early season crops like lettuces, sugar snap peas, radishes, broccoli, and kale (with proper protection from a frost blanket while temperatures can still dip into the 30s and 40s)! Your raised bed garden has been hibernating all winter, hopefully covered with some kind of mulch - or maybe pumping out winter vegetables. Now is the time to give your soil the care and nutritional boost it needs to grow an abundant spring and summer garden!
A note to gardeners: there are a million ways to get your garden ready for spring. This is our tried-and-true technique for established raised garden beds. If you are starting a new garden or planting straight into soil, check out our past blog post on breaking ground on a new garden.
A raised bed vegetable garden before spring soil preparation. The beds are covered with a winter mulch of straw to protect them from compacting rains.
Step 1: Remove Old Vegetables and Mulch + Prepare
The first step in the soil amendment process is to create a blank slate by pulling out any spent crops leftover from last season. We pull these out at the root because established root systems decompose slowly and make it difficult to evenly mix amendments into the soil. If you have garlic in your garden (which won’t be ready to harvest until July), work around these plants.
If your soil was protected by straw or leaf mulch over the winter, rake this up and dispose of it in a compost pile or green bin. We like to first use a hard rake to gather the mulch into a pile for easy scooping, then follow with a spring or leaf rake to pick up any straggling pieces.
If you have drip irrigation in your beds, now is a great time to pull the lines out of the way so that the soil surface is completely clear. Give the soil one more pass with the hard rake until there are no more pockets or mounds to ensure that amendments can be distributed evenly.
Remove winter mulch (in this case straw) with a hard rake to clear the soil surface.
Step 2: Add Your Amendments
Next it is time to replenish and add fertility to the soil in the form of amendments! All soils are unique and doing a home soil test or sending a soil sample in for professional analysis are both great ways to get to know your garden’s specific needs. For most established gardens without major fertility issues, it is safe to estimate amendment levels along the following ratios: for each 32 square foot raised bed (our standard 8’ x 4’ bed size), add 2 cubic feet of compost and 0.5 cubic feet of composted chicken manure. So, for example, if your raised bed is 12’ x 4’ (48 square feet), you would add 3 cubic feet of compost and 0.75 cubic feet of composted chicken manure.
Compost is the most important annual amendment because, in addition to contributing to soil fertility, it adds organic matter that does wonders for soil structure and workability. For a deep dive on why compost is the perfect amendment, check out our previous blog post. Some of our most-loved compost brands are Dirt Hugger, Ocean Rich Fish Compost, and SeaCoast Compost. All of these can be purchased at our favorite supplier, Concentrates Inc. in Milwaukie, OR.
In addition to compost, we apply organic fertilizer in the form of composted chicken manure. Fertilizer gives your soil a boost by contributing many of the nutrients that vegetables need to thrive (N-P-K or Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium). We like composted chicken manure because its N-P-K ratios are relatively balanced and it is ground into a uniform texture for easy incorporation into the soil. Our go-to brand is Stutzman Farms Sup’r Green. A note of caution: avoid adding too much chicken manure (or any other fertilizer) because an over-abundance of nitrogen in the garden can do more harm than good. Excessive nitrogen causes plants to put too much energy into vegetative growth, resulting in delayed or inadequate fruiting and root production.
Finally, rake the compost and fertilizer into an even layer across your bed to get consistent distribution throughout the soil during the next and final step in the soil amending process!
Adding compost to the raised bed.
Step 3: Incorporate Your Amendments into the Soil
Now it’s time for some good old fashioned heavy lifting! Work the amendments into the top 6-8’’ of soil using a garden fork, which does an excellent job of tilling soil and breaking up dirt clods. Make sure the compost and chicken manure are well mixed with the pre-existing soil. Finish the process by breaking up any surface clods with a hard rake and smoothing the soil into an even surface.
Forking compost and chicken manure into the existing raised bed soil.
And just like that, your garden is ready for the planting season ahead! Your future self - and all those tiny plants that are soon to be in the ground - will thank you for laying excellent groundwork. Happy gardening!
A freshly amended raised bed that is ready for spring planting!
Amelia Barker
Originally from New York, Amelia moved to Oregon in 2016 and has been farming ever since. She has worked on and managed farms from 16 acre mixed veggies to an intensive half acre of cut flowers. Her love of plants also manifested at school educational gardens, a genomics lab at a botanical garden, a seed saving nonprofit in Bangalore, India, and flower shops across the country. When she’s not puttering in the garden, find Amelia working on a sewing project or exploring a new park with her daughter.
