Soil Preperation

Without question soil is the most important part of your garden bar none.

You can manage any part of your garden fairly successfully but if you ignore your soil you will end up having a sub-optimal garden which will eventually deflate your enthusiasm going forward. Now before you get nasty images in your head about backbreaking digging and shoveling I’m going to propose to you something a little different.

The No-till approach to gardening (and farming).

Most of you are familiar with or at least have an idea of the traditional way of gardening and doing soil prep. It goes something like this…

 
 

TRADITIONAL ORGANIC SOIL PREP TECHNIQUE:

  1. Dig your beds
  2. Turn over the soil to bury the weeds, loosen up and aeriate the soil
  3. Add compost or manure
  4. Weed several times throughout the season.


And I din’t even mention Double-digging! Ugh. Nope, Not this guy.

But why??? Or rather, why not use the time honed traditional way you might ask? It’s organic after all!
 

Well, how about this… It’s not NATURAL!!! The soil doesn’t like it!!! The organisms in the soil don’t like it!

This is really, really important in the “BetterThanOrganic”™ no-till method of gardening.

 
 

“BetterThanOrganic”™ NO-TILL BED PREP TECHNIQUE:(assuming you have an existing garden plot)

  1. DO NOT Dig your beds
  2. Add 1 to 2 inches of compost
  3. Cover your beds with newspaper (5-10 sheets) or yardbags (cut open) – ONLY necessary if you have a weed problem.
  4. Cover with a thin layer of mulch. (could be compost, aged manure, woodchips etc. – Alternately you could reverse step 2 and 3 if you are short of materials such as compost or mulch. ( compost will act as mulch wery well)
  5. Leave for 3-4 weeks if possible then plant. If not you may cut holes in the paper to plant your veggies.

    6.  
    That’s it. NO DIGGING!!!

 
 

SO WHO’S HAPPY NOW?

Here is Charles Dowding from England preparing a soil bed in 29 seconds (ok, ok, 10 minutes.)…

 

 
 

You just gotta love that. Fast and easy.

 
But, but, but, what about weeds, soil compaction and aeration?
 
Weeds? Gone. All of them. And you didn’t have to pull even one. Now that’s my kind of gardening. Nice.

Soil compaction? Assuming you are working with existing beds compaction shouldn’t be of any concern unless you had an elephant sleeping in your beds or used your beds as a dance floor at the last wedding party. The worms and other living organisms, continually do their work to keep the soil properly loosened for your veggies to thrive. As you add compost over time it will work itself down via the soil organisms and ‘condition’ your soil deeper and deeper every year.

We visited Paul & Elizabeth Kaiser Singing Frogs Farm in Northern California recently and as we were walking around talking about soil Paul stuck his hand into the soil well past his elbow without any effort and said that this goes down 4 feet!!! and that took about 6 years from scratch to build!
 
Watch the short interview by Curtis Stone ( another incredible urban farmer from Kelowna BC ) talking with Paul and Elizabeth about soil etc. on their farm.
 
 

 

So what if you don’t have a ready made garden bed? No problem. In fact it requires only a bit more effort than an existing bed. In a new bed you need to do one of two things. Either till it if the soil is really copacted ( this is the only time we advocate tillage ) or use the Cardboard Method. We use yard bags very successfully as a substitute for cardboard. We cut our yard bags along the side and open them up to give us double the coverage. The yardbags smother even the strongest and most nasty weeds.

here is Morag Gamble showing us how…
 

 

Here again is Charles Dowding showing two alternate methods.

 

 

So there you have a quick primer on the easiest, most beneficial for way to prep your garden soil.

Do note that the gardeners in the videos are using raised beds which we highly recommend. The farmers mostly do not as it interferes with their high production techniques. We use both on our modest farm with great results. Our raised beds are 6″, 12″ and 18/24″ high.

To learn more about raised beds go here.