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Is it all grass now? You can just use a shovel to dig up the grass where you want the beds. Depending on how large of an area and what you want to plant, you might want to rent or borrow a tiller just to bust it up some. For a smaller bed, you can just use a hoe or shovel to bust it up some, but if you're talking multiple larger beds, a tiller would make short work of it without breaking your back. We have several short bushes on either side of our front porch, just dug a deep enough hole to plant them in, and we cover the beds with pinestraw.

This is the hoe I have, and the double tines on the back will bust up the top layer of soil pretty quickly, faster than using a shovel.



As far as edging, you can put up any sort of border you want. My neighbor has the metal borders that click together and you drive them into the ground. The large bed around an oak in my front yard, when we moved in about 15 years ago there were interlocking long bricks that I left there. Similar to this:

If the soil under the grass is good then I’d skip topsoil. Maybe a few bags of it tilled into the soil if it is more clay or hard soil. It will help the plants to grow if you get some garden soil and fill it in some but it might not be needed. As far as mulch, get whatever will look best and put some sort of rock or stone border at the house if you’re worried about termites. Our house is brick so not a huge concern there. Another thing I thought of is adequate drainage. You don’t want the mulch to wash away so if your gutters will keep the rain from washing out the beds near the house that is good. Pine bark mulch will wash away some with big rains unless you have borders to keep it in place.

Where is this going? If you have the space, just build up beds using mix. For a border, I’ve used the rubber mat runner that looks like Mulch from Home Depot. I lay it touching the grass and up on the bed. Edge between the bottom and the runner.

As far as plants. What kind of sun do you have? How much time do you want to spend screwing with it. If you stick to plants like Lilly’s, agapanthus, shrubs, Cleara, pretty much plant and forget it. Knock out roses are an easy color plant that’s pretty hardy. Verbena is a good color plant that will hold up to our hear as well

things you need to know..

do you need a drip edge?
what kind of rock do you plan to use around the border of the house?

how much dirt do i need to remove to make sure border is well under the Top of concrete on foundation?

what kind of soil is there so you know how much you need to remove?

landscaping is simple but time and labor heavy. good luck

So I tackled this project last year and I will say first of all that youtube videos are definitely your friend. But with that said, the professionals make it look ALOT easier than it is haha.

The first thing is to figure out how big you want your beds to be. If its going to be decently big, Id highly recommend renting a small backhoe from a rent-all type of place vs digging your bed up. I spent about 20 total hours digging out my beds and then realized I could have rented a small backhoe for about 100 bucks. Now I decided Id try to get fancy and have nice curved sections in multiple area’s and while the complements on it are always nice, it is also not the easiest to line up if you are extremely anal about things like I am.

As mentioned above youll want a drip line away from the house. Because we were doing the entire front of our home, it was actually cheaper to buy a half load of the nicer sized “egg rock” which are typically about 2” in size bc a small bag of them at HD or Lowes is around 8 bucks a bag and it wouldve taken a ton of bags to do. I measured the length of my overhang and then added an extra 6” just because I had so much rock but it ended up working out really well because we are able to easily walk along the rocks and do work in the back of the beds without even stepping on the mulch. As far as the edging, I spray painted the outline for the beds and after digging everything out, used Pavestone 4 in. x 11.75 in. x 6.75 in. Concrete Retaining Wall Blocks to make the borders.

As for plants, Id take pics of the area you have dug out, and then go to your local nursery and ask their advice on what would work well and what wouldn’t. The amount of sunlight you have in that area and also the amount of upkeep you want to do will have a huge factor in what to get.

You can use your garden hose to lay out the shape of the beds you plan to put in. It will bend and form curves to your liking if you so choose free form beds with no real sharp angles.

Like others have said, remove sod, check condition of soil and if heavy clay, add organic matter and till it in.

I like to then add my landscape fabric and then cut slits in it to plant what I want in the beds, then mulch. Keep it all well watered until the plants establish themselves, then water as needed.

No matter how well you prepare the beds, put in landscape fabric, mulch heavily you will still get weeds. They are part of gardening as much as watering, planting and fertilizing.