reusing beds

amandstu

I planted a bed of lettuce seeds and have now transplanted them.
What ,ideally should I do with this old bed?

Will it have deteriorated over the course of the 3 weeks or so that it took the lettuce to grow to that size ?
If I sowed more lettuce seeds on the same ground would they be less successful?

Could I just throw in an extra few fertilizer pellets to compensate or should I look to be using that ground for something that wasn't so particular regarding the quality of soil (carrots perhaps) -and starting from scratch if I want to make a bed for ,say lettuce seeds ?

By the way the way I make my beds initially is to
1: start with an old bed (obviously)
2: cart in a few barrowloads of well rotted stable manure
3: cart in a similar amount of (let's call it) rotted lawn turf (it is actually an amalgam of soil "scrapings" and weeds that have sat for up to a year to form a sort of compost)
4: work all these together as if you were making scones (or short crust pastry) until they blend (I use a cultivator or the back of a fork for this)
5: level off
6: notice there is no real deep digging involved so I am not sure it ideal for everything...

The Gardener

Judging by what you have added to the soil there should be no problem growing more vegetables in that bed. Seeds carry a store of nutrients to give the seedlings a good start in life so your lettuce seedlings would have extracted little or no nutrients from the soil. It might be a bit rich for carrots or other root vegetables considering you added rotted stable manure to the soil, but there should be no problem growing other vegetables.

amandstu

thanks.

So might I expect to get ,say a series of radishes from the same bed over the course of the Summer ?(I know there would be no need to use the same bed for that crop as I could throw them in any odd corner of any available bed but suppose I did want to use the same bed just for radishes).

I would imagine it would be possible to grow up to half a dozen or more such crops (of radishes) over the summer.

Would they start to be less successful after a while ?(it is not so easy to get nice succulent mild radishes)

I have never actually tried that as I always look for the best soil possible for salad plants and I tend to make new beds here and there over the course of the season which I can hopefully use.