If you have chosen an area that is already being used as a vegetable garden, you can prepare the soil by simply digging it up or tilling it with a rotary tiller or two wheel tractor, followed in spring by hoeing or a second round of tilling to prepare the bed for sowing/transplanting.
If, on the other hand, the area is overgrown, you need to clear it by removing grass, weeds, brushwood and stones, before performing an initial round of soil cultivation deeper below the surface, which will enable the bed to accommodate crops.
If you don't want to use weed killer when carrying out preliminary clearing before preparing the soil for your vegetable garden, cut the grass with your garden tractor and then remove the weeds with a hoe, extracting them together with the roots. Among the many models of garden tractor, if you’re looking for an agricultural garden tractor useful for preparing soil in vegetable plots, Oleo-Mac suggests the manoeuvrable MISTRAL 72/12.5 KH rider mower, the OM 103/16 K and OM 103/22 V rear-discharge garden tractors or the APACHE 92 EVO professional all-terrain tractor.
For deep cultivation however, you can take advantage of a rotary tiller with plough (one of our accessories for rotary tillers), or attach a specialised accessory such as a harrow. In fact, harrowing is a minimally invasive alternative to deeper soil cultivation.
Autumn preparation of the vegetable garden is about improving the physical and chemical characteristics of the soil, by adding and burying (as appropriate) sand or soil, manure or mature compost or mineral fertilisers (such as NPK) and pH correctors. Again you can perform these jobs with a garden tractor, this time equipped with a spreader.
In spring, paying close attention to the type of soil and its moisture level, you can flatten the soil with a roller towed by the garden tractor. You can do this either before sowing the vegetable seeds, so as to break up any remaining small clods or compress light soil that is too soft, or after sowing, to make the seeds adhere to the soil.
When is the best time of year to cultivate soil? If you are preparing a vegetable garden, autumn is the ideal time to cultivate the soil ready for growing vegetables the following year: that means between September and October here in northern Italy, or between November and mid-December in the South. By preparing the vegetable garden in autumn rather than at other times of year, you exploit both the natural effect of freezing/thawing, rain and winter weather that helps to break up the earth, and also the effect of time, as the soil gradually absorbs the nutrients supplied by the underground fertiliser.
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