Double Digging

So in the last post I said we "planned" to use a lasagna gardening system, filling our beds in the fall and letting them decompose over the winter. However as we looked into the amount of material that would be needed for lasagna gardening we realized we were behind the eight ball with an urban garden. Lasagna gardening requires access to lots of chopped up leaves, and straw, and grass clippings none of which we had available.

So instead we let the gardens sit over the winter with the intent of double digging come spring. For those of you who have never heard of double digging, the concept is this. Strip off the top twelve inches of soil. Turn over the next twelve inches of soil underneath and then use a pitch fork to loosen as far down as you can. Then replace the top twelve inches. A labor intense process to be sure but it leads to raising the soil level roughly four to six inches and loosening the soil down to a level of two feet or so. Below are some pictures of the double dug bed on the left and the not yet dug bed on the right. It is a little hard to see but if you look at the edges you can see how much higher the soil level is on the left. We did this starting in mid-March and continuing as the individual beds are planted.

Part of double digging is a good opportunity to improve the garden beds with organic material and any necessary nutrients. In our case this was adding compost and upping the nitrogen which we did organically using blood meal.

A side note regarding compost that I feel is important. I learned this purely coincidentally but many commercial composts come from something called sewer sludge. This is a refined sludge created from waste treatment plants. Yes, it is treated human waste that is used for much of our compost. However this isn't disturbing for the reasons you may think. Properly composted all animal waste, including human, is high quality fertilizer. However because this sludge comes from waste treatment plants it includes everything else that is flushed down the toilet. Many commercial composts include heavy metals and trace amounts of various pharmaceuticals. That is the disturbing part. So.. if you are going to use compost best thing is your own compost pile, but if you have to buy it ask some questions about where it comes from.


Undug on the right, double dugged on the left.


Undug



Double Dug