Tilling Only but Keeping Beds with Paths

If tilling and raking your own mounded beds is too much work, just add compost and till your whole garden as usual and skip pulling up the path soil to create higher, mounded growing beds. Still organize your garden into a mixture of wide beds and comfortable paths, making sure the beds never get walked in, and just trample the path soil instead of pulling it up.

Many garden plants do quite well with this method. Sure, they might do a little better in a double-dug bed but not enough to warrant the extra work involved. The extra growth in bush beans, for example, can easily be matched by simply planting a few more bean plants. Being in such loose soil can actually mean requiring extra supports for some plants. Typical for tomatoes anyway and easy enough for peppers, it’s not hard to add extra, but adding support is awkward for plants like corn.

Trenching, bastard trenching, double digging, and even loosening the soil with a digging fork might be ideal methods, richly rewarding those who undertake them, but there are plenty of people who might not want to, or be able to, put in that level of intense effort for their whole garden. And that’s just fine. The underlying point is that those who what to garden grow fruits and vegetables and enjoy it, not that they follow any one method, and that every gardener has multiple options based on his or her own desired level of intensity and hoped-for results. Besides, once any gardener tries multiple methods, their own experiments and experiences become their best guide.

This method in particular, while much less intense, can still get amazing, if a bit lessened, results. Personally, I use it, or a slight derivative, quite often for corn, melons, and winter squash beds, and think it and tilling and raking your own mounded beds are among the best methods for such beds.

The Method

Again, 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, lay out your garden into wide beds and paths of comfortable widths, and simply walk on the soil of the paths, compacting it. Keeping plants in wide beds that are never walked in keeps your soil as loose as possible all season and is incredibly beneficial to your plants. Based on what we’ve learned about our plants’ roots, it makes perfect sense that these larger areas of loosened soil produce much better results than single rows that inevitably have compacted paths right next to each plant. Ideal path and bed widths vary a little depending on what plants are being grown and where they are in your garden. More details on all of this, including the ideal size of beds and the ideal layout of plants within beds, are provided in the next section.

One Derivative

Whether this fits best here or in Tilling and Raking Your Own Mounded Beds can be argued. However, one can also just have stepping spots in much larger beds instead of paths. Not having paths means much less soil is compacted, leaving much wider loosened areas of soil for roots to spread freely. This specific adaptation works marvelously for large beds containing melons, winter squash, and corn since they don’t need regular attention and like lots of space in which to spread (corn below the soil and melons and squash above it but regularly rooting generously below it at multiple points where their vines touch the soil). One word of advice, however: Be realistic about the distance between your stepping spots, considering everyone who helps in the garden when choosing it. If they’re made too far apart, you may end up being the only person willing to make the giant leaps required to enter this part of the garden (Don’t ask me how I know this.). Plus, you may have a hard time reaching each plant to tend it.

An option to hem in the raised soil from whichever method you use and even be able to add more soil or cured compost on top is building raised beds.