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
Deep Most gardeners add richness and organic matter with soil amendments and till them in, attempting to create ideal soil, but tillers only incorporate these amendments and loosen the soil about six-to-eight inches deep. Our garden plants, however, actually benefit greatly from our soil being improved and loosened much, much Read more
Well-Loosened Most gardeners know that our garden plants really suffer in deeply compacted soil. This is one of our reasons for tilling each season. We till to destroy weeds and turn vegetation into the soil, sure, but we also till to loosen the soil. We all know this intuitively. We’d Read more
Well-Drained Well-drained soils allow water to seep through and drain to the deeper water table. They also keep plants from partially suffocating or even completely drowning after massive rains. What we want, as gardeners, is evenly moist soil, not waterlogged soil. Well-drained soil accomplishes this, even after heavy downpours. We Read more