Adding a vegetable garden into a section of your backyard is a fun way to grow your own fresh vegetables through the summer. Depending on the size of your backyard, you can plant a vegetable garden as large as you want. The more area in your garden, the more variety and number of vegetables you can grow. Here are some helpful tips to use a Bobcat rental to build a large, new garden in your backyard.

Clear a Garden Space

If your backyard has a full lawn, then you will need to mark off your future garden site and remove the sod from the soil. One of the quickest and least labor-intensive ways to do this is to use a bobcat rental with a construction bucket. This type of bucket attachment has heavy duty teeth on the bottom edge of the bucket to dig into the soil below the grass in your yard. If you plan this task in advance, you may be able to sell or give your sod to someone in your area that needs sod for their yard. 

Water your lawn in the area you are going to cut up the day before. This will soften the soil and loosen the sod's roots, preparing it for the next day's sod transplant

With the bobcat's bucket teeth positioned into the lawn, move the bobcat forward to dig into the sod, removing it at the roots. You should cut the sod to a thickness of no more than two inches. This will get plenty of the lawn's root so it can be successfully transplanted into another yard that same day. 

Prepare Your Garden Soil

After the lawn has been removed from your garden plot, you should fertilize the soil to add nutrients back to grow vegetables. A bobcat's soil conditioner attachment can make this step easy as well. A healthy garden will need the right amount of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, and you can fertilize your garden with all three of these with a fertilizer mix. 

You will need one pound of a 10-10-10 fertilizer mix or 2 pounds of a 5-10-5 fertilizer for every 100 feet of row in your garden. You can find this at most home improvement stores. Add the garden fertilizer onto a section of your garden, then spread it evenly around your garden using the soil conditioner attachment on your bobcat. This attachment will spread and level the fertilizer over your garden plot so you can till it into the soil.

Use the bobcat's tiller attachment to till the fertilizer deep into the soil where your plant roots will grow. The tiller also loosens hard clumps of earth and makes the soil soft and workable so it will be easy for you to plant your vegetables.

Protect Your Garden

If you have any young children or animals that play in your yard, you may want to install a garden fence around the perimeter of your garden to protect your plants. Your bobcat rental has a power auger attachment, making it simple to dig fence post holes. 

Mark the perimeter of your garden with stakes and some fluorescent string to determine where to dig the fence posts. Most fences are built in six to eight-foot sections, with fence posts anchoring the fence into the ground. The fence post holes will need to be buried at least two feet four inches deep to stabilize your fence. Make sure the fence posts are level, then you can use cement to anchor the fence posts in the ground. 

Build a fence gate large enough for the bobcat to access your garden, so you can use the bobcat to till your garden this fall and again next spring.

Using the right machinery in your garden makes it easy to get your garden ready.