Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
As my father would say, with my apologies to our beloved
cat, Patrick, in advance, “there's more than one way to skin a
cat.” Meaning, of course, that double-digging is not the only
suitable way to prepare soil for mini-farming. There are
actually three ways of digging the beds.
Digging Methods
The old-timers where I grew up never used the term
double-digging. In the United States and Great Britain, that
practice has been historically known as “bastard trenching” to
differentiate it from full or “true” trenching. Most modern
texts don't mention it, but there are actually three sorts of
trenching that are useful under different circumstances. All
three types of trenching are brutally hard work, particularly in
areas with a lot of large rocks or with soils composed mainly
of clay, but they offer benefits worth the effort. These three
types of trenching are plain digging, bastard trenching, and
trenching.
Plain digging relies on using a garden spade to dig into and
turn over the soil to the depth of a single spade. The area to be
dug is laid out using string or other marking, and a garden
spade is used to remove the soil one-spade wide and a
single-spade deep across the width of the bed, and that soil is
placed into a wheelbarrow. Then a couple of inches of
compost is added to the bottom of the first trench, and the soil
from the next parallel trench is added on top of the compost in
the first trench. This process continues until the last trench is
dug and compost added to the bottom, and then the soil saved
from the first trench is added to the hole left by the last
trench.
