If our biggest focus is on the five elements that create the healthiest, most-productive garden plants—immense amounts of direct sunlight, amazing soil, just the right amount of water, the proper temperature, and ideal spacing— we end up with plants that practically take care of themselves! The final two big secrets—companion planting and garden design and layout—provide the final complement that bring out the absolute best of our plants.
Building Raised Beds If you prefer, once the soil underneath is loosened (via trenching, bastard trenching, double digging, a digging fork, mounding with a rake after tilling, or even just tilling), you can also make raised beds to corral your loosened soil and even to hold added soil—or just to delineate the Read more…
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 Read more…
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. Read more…
Loosening Soil with a Digging Fork With foot-long tines, a digging fork or broadfork is able to loosen the soil 12-to-14 inches deep, providing the next-best method to double-digging with only a moderate amount of work. (Tillers, by contrast, with six-inch tines, only loosen the soil six to eight inches Read more…
Double Digging’s Finer Points For most of us, double-digging provides all the benefits we need and pays true dividends. There are, however, a few finer points, options, and differences of opinion within double digging that are helpful to know, especially when starting out. Plus, it might be beneficial to know Read more…
Double Digging Like bastard trenching, double digging is a version of trenching. It’s simply trenching to loosen the soil two feet deep instead of the three-foot depth of standard trenching. As such, the trenches dug—to gain access to loosen the soil an additional foot with a digging fork—are a foot Read more…
Bastard Trenching Bastard trenching is actually an alteration of trenching that is practiced during the first few years of digging a new area as a method to keep from mixing the layers of soil before each is evenly improved by deep loosening and the addition of large amounts of organic Read more…
Trenching Trenching loosens your soil and adds cured compost to a depth of three feet. Although this method is the most intense of all of those described here, it’s the most efficient way to loosen one’s soil and add the needed organic matter to this depth and was commonly done Read more…
Trenching, Bastard Trenching, and Double Digging—An Overview Although not as common anymore, trenching, bastard trenching, and double digging have been around for centuries and have been described in gardening books dating back at least to the 1920s. They are, by far, the most intense methods but also the fastest and Read more…
Lessons from Roots: Why Our Plants Do Best in Wide Beds That Are Loosened Deeply We understand that our garden plants need rich, deep, well-drained, well-loosened soil that’s full of organic matter, but how deep and how loose is ideal? Why so deep? And why is planting in beds so Read more…