Using Rows & Hills to Plant a Garden

This is my organic garden, and once you get the soil prepared and ready to plant, then you have to put the dirt in rows or hills, depending on what you’re planting. So I’ll demonstrate that.

Right here, I’ll make a row, and this will be for cucumbers. So I’ll pull the dirt the mulch- to the side, because I want to put that on the plant afterwards. And I’m going to mix the sandy loam with the clay, limestone, kalichy-type soil that has been worked for many years, so it’s in pretty good shape. And see how loose the soil is? That’s a result of preparing the soil twice a year for about twenty years. So this will be for cucumbers, and what I’ll do is make a hill. It doesn’t have to be a big hill. There- that’s a hill. Now, what I’ll do is put three cucumbers in the top of each hill, and I’ll spread the hills about five or six- about four or five feet apart.

The other way to plant, and the most common way that I plant, is in a row. And again, to plant this, I’ll mix the sandy loam in with my clay, kalichy-type soil. And I’m planting okra and that has to be planted at a certain depth- each seed has a different depth that it’s planted at. And then I drag my cultivating tool along to make a row- to make a little ditch that the seeds go in. And I do that along each one of these rows all the way down.