Go ahead and make your border...

Thanks Moon grower, I will. Why do 'they' say stop digging until the end of the year then?

To conserve water in the soil perhaps during the hot weather ? but I dig when I need to but if I want heavy soil broken up then I dig just before a frost is due. As MG said if I wanted a new bed I would do it when I thought about it!

Digging it is then.

I have no idea Ginellie, never heard of that suggestion and we dig when we need to dig. The heavy digging for the veg. garden is done in late autumn early winter to allow the frost to break up the soil but we've created new flower beds in the middle of summer. Remember to let the bed settle before planting the fuchsias, or anything else.

No offense taken MG but Isnt that another way of saying what I said?

Thanks to you both for your comments. When you say 'settle' MG, for how long?

Drc have you never answered a question that has already been answered before? Sometimes it is useful for the person asking the question to hear the same info more than once - that way they know it is not just one person's opinion.

Ginellie when you dig out a new border and add compost or other organic matter the soil is very loose and has a lot of air pockets in it. It takes at least a couple of weeks and either some rain or the sprinkler on the bed for the soil to settle to the height it is going to be. If you plant before this the soil will settle down leaving anything you have planted sitting half out of the ground. During that time Mr MB & I tend to try to work out what is going to go where so that we can plant it all fairly quickly once we are able to.

That is such a good thing to know MG. Common sense I guess, but I would have just dug and planted and then had very exposed fuchsias. Thanks.

We both had gardening parents so learnt a lot of the info without even realising we were doing so as children.