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…
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…
Crop Rotations Put simply, garden crops need to be rotated, or planted in a different spot, each year. The reasons usually fall into two categories: First, some plants pull so much of a certain nutrient out of the soil—corn feeding heavily on nitrogen, for example—that the soil needs a year Read more…
Past Paradigms Walk into a garden in the 1950s and you can guess the layout: rows. We can all imagine them. They’re the most salient feature of gardens from that era—and many through today. Seeing it in person or in our mind’s eye, we can even imagine the process: a Read more…