My First Garden: How to Start Your First Garden

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How to start your own garden.

About 3 weeks ago I started my first ever garden. I’m a person that puts the word garden in the same bucket as cooking or decorating. It’s a domestic type of thing and I don’t do domestic things well.

We had many other COVID projects and one was the front yard. We had our front porch that was so old that I’m pretty sure it was a safety hazard. Next was the garden and picket fence. When thinking about how to start your own garden, you would naturally go to Google. Thankfully there was an abundance of resources to pull from.

I had a vision in mind. A garden that curved around the side of my new front porch, a rock border, and a bench or picnic table to the side. For anyone else that is thinking about how they can start their own garden, these were the steps I took and what I’ve learned and am still learning. This post is for other beginners like me, expert gardeners there is nothing to find here ?

How to Start Your First Garden

Garden materials you will need

Some of these items we already had. Given this was our first ever garden we were starting, there was a lot we had to buy. I added links below so you can get a rough estimate of how much this could cost you.

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• Rake
• Shovel (spade-shaped, see learnings at the end). We already had the spaded shovel. We bought a flat one, which I don’t think we needed. Razor-Back shovel.
• Garden hose
• Garden hose watering wand
• Topsoil (6 bags)

• Compost (1 bag)
• Mulch (6 bags)

• Your choice of plants. We chose Geraniums, Salvia “May Night” and Petunias

• Rocks (if you choose to do a rock border as we did). We used Rain Forest rocks.
• Rubber mallet (for the rocks)
• A smaller spade for digging the holes for the plants
• Soil tiller
• Landscape fabric
• Landscape spikes

Step by Step: How to Plant Flowers in Your First Garden

This is assuming this is your first garden. If you want to learn how to maintain or add/change a garden that already exists, then this is a great post. 

1. The first thing you want to do is mark where you want the garden to be. We used spray paint for this. This helped guide us, otherwise our garden would have likely been crooked. 

2. Use a spade-shaped shovel to dig up the sod. I realize that many of you likely know what sod is, but I didn’t when I started. So in case you are like me, sod is just the grass and soil underneath.
   • Beginner tips
     • Water the grass the night before. I did not do this and I was dying. You should water a few days before. You want it moist, but not soggy, as this is evidently bad for the plant’s growth. 
     • Dig into the ground first at the top, bottom, and sides of the strip of grass you are looking to remove. I did do this and it made it so much easier. This way when you go to pry up the strip it comes up a lot easier. 

3. Breakup the sod, dispose of the grass and use it in other places. We threw away the dead grass and used the soil to put in holes in our backyard and put back into the holes we dug for the garden. Honestly not sure if the sod was still healthy, but since there was grass I’m assuming it was.

4. After adding healthy soil back, use a tiller to break-up the soil where you will be planting and mix in any of the soil you added back. I read that you can use a tiller and bypass the shoveling. We have a manual tiller and would want to have a tilling machine for this. The same thing was accomplished, sod removed and organic material was mixed back into the garden bed. 

5.  Lay down the landscape fabric. This is to help control the weeds. Use the mallet to tap in your fabric spikes to keep the fabric down. 

6. How to plant your flowers. Place your plants where you want them so you know where to dig the hole. Each plant should have on the tag how far it should be away from the next plant or you can look it up online. We chose a color theme of pink, purples, and whites.
   • Beginner tip
     • How to avoid a second trip for more plants. We went to the store and got everything we needed at once and didn’t really know how many plants we’d need. So we had to go back a second time. If we did this again, I would use cups and pots or something to help me see how many plants I would need, using about a foot or so of space between each plant. 

7. Take a pocket knife and cut an X where you want each plant to go. I did this as I moved from plant to plant, but in the future I will cut them all at the same time. As you are moving around plants shift and you wind up planting not in the exact place you intended. 
8. Use the smaller garden spade to dig the holes about 2 inches deeper and wider than the pot. For the larger plants, you can use the shovel. 

9. Add a layer of the compost at the bottom of the hole. What I learned. Topsoil and compost are not the same and you need both to create the most ideal environment. 
10. Next, you remove the plant from the pot. I have no idea how to plant seeds. I assume you’d put them in the hole, but still have more to learn there. I was so nervous I was going to rip the plant apart, as you will see the roots coming out of the holes in the bottom of the pot. Make sure to squeeze and twist the pot and gently pull by the stem until the plant is free. 
11. Loosen the roots at the bottom of the plant. I just squeezed the bottom a bit until the roots were loose. This is so the roots branch out into the soil and forms a good foundation. I forgot to do this with my first 3 plants. Not sure what this will mean for the long-term, but I will let you know when I find out. 
12. Place the plant in the hole and fill with soil. We filled with a mix of the soil that we dug up for each hole and the topsoil. We also had the bottom compost layer. Pack down the soil for each plant.

13. Add your layers of topsoil and mulch. Add a layer of topsoil over your entire garden bed. Then follow-up with a layer of mulch. Give them a good soaking. We also used this Miracle-grow adapter for our hose and gave the plants a little extra love to help them blossom sooner.

Steps to add a rock border for your garden.

We also chose to add a rock border to our garden. We used these to delineate between the garden and the smaller pebbles we got for our bench. 

1. Purchase whatever types of rocks you want to use. Some user river rocks or larger flat rocks. We really liked the look of the rain forest rocks. 
2. Dig and add mulch. Dig a 4-inch trench at the edge of your garden. We only dug 1 to 2 inches and I think it would have looked better if we dug a couple more inches. Make sure that your garden fabric is over the soil and add a layer of mulch. 
3. Add a layer of rock into the trench you dug and use the rubber mallet to tap them more firmly into the ground. I’m not sure this worked the way it was supposed to since I didn’t dig enough. 

4. Add as many layers as you like. We have a curve of our garden where it comes out and we choose to add an extra layer there.

See my two day journey condensed into just under 10 minutes?

Lessons learned in setting up my first garden

• A shovel with a flat-edge is better for scooping, but the spade shovel will make your digging job so much easier.
• You should wet your grass where you need to dig a few days before to make it easier on you. 
• Try to use a circular object or another type of object to estimate how many plants you will need. 
• Have a vision for your plant choice, but be flexible. Home Depot didn’t have a few of the plants I wanted and I needed to improvise. 
• Look into how to protect your plants of choice from bugs ahead of time. Something is going on with my pink flowers. I think bugs are eating them or this is just how they die and respawn? Not sure??‍♀️

• Cut all the holes at once so your pots don’t move around and you lose track of where you want them placed. 
• Don’t let your husband put sunscreen on your back if you will be outside planting a garden all day ??‍♀️ Luckily I had my CounterSun Cooling Gel that helped this go away pretty quickly.

• Use garden gloves. I started shoveling before our trip to Home Depot and I could feel the blisters starting to form.

So much more to learn

• Perennials vs. Annual – I know perennials come back after going dormant in the winter and annuals only grow once. But that is about it. I want to learn more about strategies of planting these together and which plants are which. I got a mix this time.
• How to maintain my garden – I know I’m supposed to water them every 3 days and I feed them about every 14 days, but there has to be more than that, right?

This garden was one of the best things I could have done. It reminded me why it’s so important to always push yourself outside of your comfort zone.

I hope this is helpful if you are thinking about how to start your first garden. Download a quick infographic to remember the most important steps.

Request to join my Facebook group to follow me on my journey, which gardening is one part of. 

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