**When you start preparing a vegetable garden it is up to you how much work you want to do**

I follow natural gardening techniques so when I am preparing a vegetable garden I do not do very much. When I am preparing a vegetable garden from a well manicured lawn the first thing I do is

mow the grass as short as possible. Then I roll out some trickle irrigation pipes about a foot or 30 centimeters apart. Now it is time to start planting.

I walk around with a stick and a little bag of spinach seed.

I poke a little hole in the ground, drop in a seed and spoke another hole about 6 inches or 15 centimeters apart and drop in another seed. This is the difficult way, sowing one seed at a time but it is the least wasteful of seeds. You can use seed-balls but they take a bit of time to make but they are also very effective. If you have lots of seed and no time just throw the seeds all over the place. It is best to do this just before it rains because with drip irrigation the water doesn’t always water all the top of the soil. The water flows down in a triangle shape from the drip therefore encouraging the roots to grow down.

Now the theory behind the spinach is the spinach is a fast growing broadleaf and should grow up fast and cover the grass hopefully killing the grass off.

The reason I like planting the seeds separately is because I will keep planting spinach in the areas where the seeds don’t come up until I have a carpet of spinach. This cover crop should stop the weeds and grass growing. But it is not always that simple because all plants will grow when given sunlight and water.

For more information about how to grow vegetables check out our Vegetable Gardening page