How to Lay Out Flower Beds

Create a flower bed design for your garden by drawing your garden design. The design should indicate where you want to plant your flower beds and highlight the optimal places in the garden for them.

Highlight the areas on the design map that get full sunshine, partial sunshine and full shade using the highlighter. Take a walk in your garden to determine the soil type in each of the highlighted areas. For example, make a note whether the soil is fluffy, sandy or clay.

Categorize your flowers for the flower bed into sunshine categories. Put the flowers that require full sunlight into one category, partial sunlight into another and full shade into a third. This ensures that you plant the right flowers in the proper areas with the best growing conditions.

Use a hand rake and hand plow to remove any weeds or plants that are currently planted, but that you want removed from the flower bed. This not only removes the plants and weeds, but also aerates and prepares the soil for the plants.

Draw the perimeter of the flower bed on the grass using grass paint. This can be left-over football grass paint, if you have that stored away.

Use the shovel to create the flower bed. Push the shovel straight down along the line to create a nice edge. Dig three to four inches down and remove the grass and edges shovelled up, so you have a nicely shaped soil bed. Once the edge has been made and the grass has been removed from the bed, use the hand plow to loosen the soil in the bed and preparing it for planting.

Plant the tallest and largest flowers first. These often go in the back of the bed. Use a small shovel to create a hole for the flower's roots and place the flower in the bed. Cover the flower's roots with the soil and pat the soil lightly.

Plant the smaller flowers in front of the larger plants using the same method as the big flowers.

Water the flower bed once all of the flowers have been planted. The flowers' roots need water to survive in the new soil. Use the tags on the flowers as guidance for watering. While some flowers need plenty of water, others only need a little to survive.