Making Your Own Compost It’s probably become clear that adding cured compost is the best way to increases your soil’s fertility and grow amazingly healthy and productive plants. It has all of the macro-and micro-nutrients plants need and contains the organic matter and humus needed to feed soil microbes, assist Read more…
Benefits Applying mulch to your garden is a wonderful way to add organic matter to your soil. Plus, adding mulch has several other very useful benefits. Adding Organic Matter Although it doesn’t typically contribute nearly the volume of organic matter that cured compost adds to your garden, regularly applying mulch Read more…
Adding Cured Compost Why Building your soil by adding cured compost is the best way to get your soil back to the ideal of five percent organic matter for two reasons: One, it’s typically the fastest way to add organic matter. Mulching and tilling in cover crops are great methods, Read more…
Dealing with Sod & Persistent Weeds Sod is the matted, entangled roots and vegetation of grassy areas. It makes adequately working the soil extremely difficult. Also, any of its remaining clumps regrow easily, creating a weedy mess that competes heavily with garden plants. If it’s growing on your prospective garden Read more…
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…