Tilling and Raking Your Own Mounded Beds

Spring is a busy time for gardeners, maybe a little too busy sometimes. It seems like everything we want to do happens in a month or two, leaving us slightly frenetic, a little overextended, and a bit exhausted by the end of it. One of my favorite easier methods, however, sprung from one such particularly busy spring, filled with its share of wonderful family gardening and a little too much digging. It taught me a few lessons: Sometimes we’re too busy—or exhausted—to prepare our soil with one of the best methods. Even though we may feel uneasy not doing our utmost for soil improvement, we always have options. That we garden that year and share it with loved ones is more important than it being done perfectly. Plus, most garden plants will do well enough if you at least give them whatever soil improvement you can that year, and some will even do quite well in moderately loosened beds.

The Story

One spring, after having already double-dug most of my own garden, one of my sisters asked me to help her double-dig hers. I was happy to help, but they ended up being two very long five-foot-wide beds that I completed mostly by myself. By the end of it, I was spent and thinking I’d had enough garden preparation for a spell, certainly for that year. I was wrong.

Right on the heels of completing that project, my other sister called, asking for help preparing her garden. I was fraught. I wanted to give her the best soil I could, so she could see the benefits of it being deeply loosened and experience the ease of gardening in it—mostly to give her a good gardening experience that year but also in hopes it’d show her how much easier gardening is in the long run if you do the work of double digging upfront.

But I was exhausted. I couldn’t get myself to double-dig even one more bed, let alone an entire garden. I pondered my alternatives, feeling uneasy about leaving her with just the standard, tilled-soil garden and another year with a typical weed-filled gardening experience but also feeling beyond overwhelmed at the thought of double digging her entire garden.

Then, I had an idea, “What if I just till the garden and pull all the loosened soil out of the would-be paths to make mounded beds? Her plants will end up having more than twice the depth of loosened soil that they’d otherwise have with just tilling alone, and, although it’s not the two-to-three feet of loosened soil of a double-dug bed, it’s much better than just tilling. I might be able to do this!”

It ended up working great. Her plants didn’t do as well as they would have in double-dug beds, but it took a fraction of the time and energy, and her plants showed marked improvement over the previous years in just tilled beds and rows. At the end of the year, she just pushed the beds back into the paths with a bow rake, and, voila, she was ready to start the whole process over the next year. 

This turned out to be a great method, one I still use for several plants, especially those that can take up a large area and don’t quite need the extremely deeply loosened soil of double digging. It’s only a little more work than tilling alone—but nothing like the work involved in double-digging. Obviously, it doesn’t loosen the soil as deeply as other methods, not even as deeply as simply loosening it with a digging fork, but it gives a way to plant in more deeply loosened soil than does tilling alone. In short, it’s something, and plants like corn, beans, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, squash, and melons respond well to its moderate loosening. Plus, it keeps the garden laid out in beds and paths, keeping the gardener out of the beds so the soil stays loose in large areas, keeping the plants happy.

The Method

There’s no rocket surgery here. The method is as simple as that described above. In each step of the process, however, there are some finer points.

First, till the entire garden to your desired friability and tilth. It depends on your tiller, which speed setting you use, and the quality of your soil, but two passes are typically enough on previously worked ground.

If sod is present, remove it, smother it, or till it in. If you have enough lead time, you have more options for smothering. For more information, see our post on dealing with sod. If you choose to till it in, make sure you make enough passes to completely pulverize the sod, not just break it up into clumps. If it doesn’t look like a smooth, well-tilled bed, it won’t act like one. Any pieces of sod will resprout if they aren’t sufficiently chopped up and mixed in, creating an unnecessarily weed-filled headache. Too much tilling isn’t good for garden soil, but this is one time it’s better to err on the side of a little overkill. Smothering the area with cardboard, a tarp, or the like for six months or more beforehand makes tilling in the sod much easier. The longer the better since the dead vegetation and roots become increasingly broken down over time so are more easily tilled into the soil.

Second, add a two-to-four-inch layer of cured compost to the entire garden and till it in. One or two passes are typically sufficient.

Third, move the soil from the path areas onto the beds to create higher, mounded growing beds. Here, you have a couple of options, interchangeable at any time based on what works best at that moment: 1) Use a shovel to toss the loosened soil from the paths onto the bed. A garden spade—with its relatively narrow, flat blade—tends to make this job a bit easier, but other shovels like small scoop shovels and gravel shovels work, too. 2) Use a bow rake to pull the loosened soil from the paths onto the beds.

Of the two methods, using a bow rake is probably a bit easier. However, when using only a bow rake, clearing the first path next to any bed can be difficult and awkward since there’s no cleared area yet to stand to reach across the bed and pull soil toward you. Instead, it often involves either lots of sideways twisting or stepping on and compacting soil you’ll want to move later, making it difficult and pointless to later shovel or pull onto the bed. To solve this, either use a shovel for the first path, or rake stepping spots in one of the paths.

To clear stepping spots, standing on an already-cleared center path (or the edge of your garden), reach a bow rake a distance you can comfortably take a big step down a soon-to-be cleared path and pull all of the loosened soil off an area sufficient for you to stand, about one-and-half-to-two-feet wide. You’ll be creating little mounds of soil between you and each newly cleared spot, but they’ll be easily taken care of later. Once you’ve cleared your first spot, step into it. From there, you can reach your rake across the bed to the path on the other side. Pull its loosened soil onto the bed, opening up a stretch of path there. Continuing this way, moving down the bed, clearing stepping spots in one soon-to-be path to gain easy access for raking soil from the other side’s path. Once you’ve worked your way all the way down the bed pulling all of the loosened soil from the other side’s path, move to that side. Use the newly cleared path to easily reach across and pull the soil onto the bed from between your stepping spots, including your little soil mounds, joining your stepping spots to form that side’s path.

At the end of the year, just like in my sister’s garden, simply push the mounded beds back into the paths, and you’re ready to start the whole process over the next year.

Adaptations

The concept of using path soil to create higher, mounded growing beds can be adapted to almost any situation.

One could, for example, loosen the future path and bed soil with a digging fork and mound this deeply loosened soil onto very high beds. This is actually one of the experimental beds I’ll write about at some point. There are some limitations. There’s only so high one can go piling path soil on top of beds before the sides become too steep. Of course, one could always add wood, metal, or concrete sides and create a bordered raised bed, losing some planting space on the slopes but gaining some ability to pile higher.

Likewise, one can simply remove the soil from stepping spots, never making full paths. For plants like melons, winter squash, and sometimes corn that don’t need regular attention and like lots of space in which to spread (melons and squash above the soil and corn below), this adaptation works marvelously. Just be realistic about your stepping spot and consider everyone who helps in the garden when choosing the distance between spots. Otherwise, you may end up being the only person willing to make the leaps to tend them. Don’t ask me how I know this.

If this method is still too much work, however, next we turn to our easiest method: tilling alone but still keeping a garden layout with wide beds with comfortable paths.