Revive Tired Soil: Why I’m Double Digging My Garden Again

Welcome back to Jacques in the Garden. Today we're going to be stepping back in time and doing something a little bit more controversial which is double digging this garden bed right here. Now double digging is how I started gardening. Every single garden bed I set up at the very start was double dug because I believed it was the best possible way to do things and frankly it's because I just read the book How to Grow More Food Biointensively by John Jeavons and it was such an inspiration. It's actually what drove me into gardening in the first place but ever since that first year I actually haven't double dug any beds and I'll say this the first year fantastic results every other year since then still great results but every once in a while I get a bed like this one here that just seems to be languishing and I've tried a lot of different things the no dig approaches such as layering tons and tons of compost and mulch on top I'm still not getting the results I need so I decided there's no reason to be dogmatic in the garden. I don't have to no till low till every single bed in my space. Every once in a while it's okay for me to go back and try things that I've done in the past. So we're going to discuss why some people don't like this method why no dig is maybe better in some use cases and I'll show you the exact procedure of how to do this whole thing on this garden bed right in front of me. Now before we do any sort of digging though we do have to remove all these plants so we can actually get our spade into the soil so I'm going to set these tools aside and start ripping out everything in here. Right now it's mostly flowers and then the rest of it is nothing to write home about. It's bolted broccoli because this is the hottest March ever and I think climate records have ever measured on the western U.S. By far the hottest March and my spring plants are well they're not happy so let's go ahead and reset this garden bed by removing all these plants first. So unfortunately one of the casualties of all this is my gigantic lobelia that I will be losing. It looks really good it's grown in quite stunningly. I think there's only like two seedlings that I put in the ground here so I'm very impressed with it but it's got to go because we just need to get this done and I don't want to work around any plants. And as for this dill here this is entirely usable so what I'm going to do is just cut it at the base and bring it into the kitchen and throw it in the fridge and we should have plenty of dill leaf to last us for the next couple weeks recipes. All right guys I know this one's going to be sad because this is a gigantic calendula but sad to see these two plants go because they did a really good job this year. If you're wondering yes this is a single calendula let me rip it by the base just to prove it to you guys. And the reason why this got so big is because I planted it in the fall allowing it to grow through the winter when it's nice and cold and that encourages extra bloom production. That's why it gets so big if you started this in spring it'll never reach the size it just simply cannot do it without that little bit of cold weather. This brussel sprout is quite something let me show you guys look at that guys those are some serious brussels on there looking quite good very happy with this harvest all right looks like dinner is sorted. This is the hardest plant to actually get rid of today because it is a poppy started from seed but the blooms are so beautiful they're so sort of ethereal they have this like wrinkly color to them which is really quite amazing it almost looks like it's not a petal but like some sort of frilled paper that somebody crumpled up and hand painted quite stunning but there's a time and season for every plant and this one if I don't remove it now it's not going to be lasting many much longer maybe a couple weeks at this point so I guess it's time to say goodbye. I mean just look at that bloom guys what a beauty really fun plant to grow in the garden. And now we are officially clear and the next thing I want to do is rake up all of this straw and we'll save it because there's nothing wrong with it maybe I'll even throw it in the compost since it's already aged a little bit but I don't want to mix it into the soil at this stage because it's just going to make the whole thing much harder so I'm going to swing the irrigation out of the way rake up and move all this mulch and then we'll actually get to double digging. At some point in 2020 I was gifted this book and now this book is called how to grow more vegetables more than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine and it's a grow biointensive sort of style this was written by John Jevons he's one of the pioneers of organic gardening and after I read this book it just kind of made sense to me I was reading through it and I was just like you know what I think I want to try gardening something about this book I don't know really compelled me and one of the methods that they actually start in the first 15 pages of the book they talk about the double digging technique now there are a couple different methods of double digging they actually break down four separate ones in this case we are going to be looking at the initial double dig there is the ongoing double dig which is a little less intensive but in this case I want a full reset we're going with the initial now what does this procedure entail well first of all it's all about the compost so right here I've got some beautiful sifted compost from my pile it looks really really wonderful it is really chock full of life it's nice and moist should bring plenty of beneficial life into this bed so this is going to be scattered across the surface of the entire bed from start to finish and we want it to be at least one inch thick so in this case I think I might need a second bin of compost in order to get this to work now it's not a method where you're directly putting the compost deep into the soil that is another way of doing it but in this case we are just spreading it on the surface and you'll see how that comes into play a little bit later this is mainly about aerating loosening texturizing the soil while still trying to get as much organic matter into the bed as possible so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to spread out compost throughout this whole area I might go grab a second bin because we want it to be a proper inch thick I am not messing around this year I want to put the right amount of compost and really get this going this is truly beautiful stuff guys you could definitely tell it's homemade compost because all throughout it I could see little bits of perlite from like composted seedlings that I put in I see eggshells because they never really fully break down into the compost mix but they are extremely brittle and fragile so there's going to be a ton of calcium available in this a ton of nutrition and uh I could only expect the best out of the situation step one of double digging is to dig so what we're going to do here is we're going to dig roughly 8 to 12 inches deep about a foot across and the first sort of digging uh the first trench that we're going to dig what we're going to do is dig across like this multiple channels the first one's going to go into this wheelbarrow and brought to the very back of the actual garden bed you'll see why as we get closer to the end of the process so I do want to mark out the actual uh diameter or width of the bed itself I'm going to say that it basically starts right about here so that's going to be my first digging point the beginning of my trench and then the end of the garden bed I'm going to base on this irrigation line here which is well it's actually pretty far back it's going to be right about here so now what I need to do is trench all the way across shovel it and put it into the wheelbarrow now I should have mentioned that one thing that makes this a lot easier is to not do it when your soil is dry having this little bit of moisture present in the soil already helps keep it all together and it makes the whole process easier so now I've got a spade roughly let's see how deep I am right about at the spade depth so we're probably about 8 to 10 inches in depth we're all the way across we have it in here now we can move it out of our way and we can begin the double digging process the first thing we need to do is actually grab a garden fork because part of the double digging process is loosening the deep soil we want to loosen it aerate it break it up make it easy for plant roots to go as far down as they actually want to go right here I've got a fancy little bucket full of crab shell meal worm castings in equal parts azomite in half quantity because you don't need as much of it then I have a nice organic fertilizer and all of that is mixed together in order to get this wonderful slurry of fantastic ingredients for plant growth so I'm going to get a nice little scoop full here I'm going to scatter it at the base of this trench and maybe I don't even need the whole scoop that's probably enough and then since I'm already here I will actually scatter a little bit of compost almost to the point where it's like meaningless this level of compost is almost nothing but just so that I could cover up the bottom and guarantee that I have some of these beneficials and organic matter deep down in the soil now the next thing we're going to do is take a garden fork like this one here and then what I'm going to do is fully push it in to the bottom until it bottoms out or as far as I could go easily and oh wow that sunk right in so what this tells me is actually something interesting which is that my soil is not compacted the fact that that went in as easy as it did is actually kind of incredible was not expecting it to go in that simple but that's what we got and I'm not mad about it so what we want to do here is just break up and loosen the soil it's going to work some of these amendments down deep as well and it's just going to ensure that we have good drainage in this bed and any deep-rooted plants well they're not going to have any hard time getting down in there the hardest thing is actually wiggling the fork because it's just wide enough essentially for the fork already and now this is why it's called double digging because what we're going to do is take the next trench and move it right over to this bed over here now there's different ways of doing this some people try to do it carefully without disturbing the soil others just kind of kick it over I'm not that worried either way like I said we're already disturbing the soil immensely so what's a little bit more disturbance so it's not a perfect process it's actually quite physically hard to do this and what you're going to notice is the first trench really nice really clean the second trench maybe a little bit more sloppy as it spills over so I was like on the fence of trying to move it all as a single piece but I decided it's probably no big deal so in this case I'm sort of texturizing the soil entirely which means that I'm breaking it up and that's just essentially making sure there's no clods making sure that everything in there is shattered but I'm not like trying to do that I am going to do it a little bit but I don't want to fully pulverize it I just want to break it up a bit now one thing that we do want to make sure is that we're not trampling all the soil that we just loosened because we're not trying to get compacted soil here in fact we're trying to do the opposite we want nice loose friable soil so what you'll see me do in a moment here is as I build out these next couple rows I'm going to put a board down so I could walk on that and that'll distribute my weight and lead to less compaction now what I want to do is show you the benefits of using a board in this process it should lead to less compaction overall and also just make this whole process a little bit easier to visualize for yourself when you're doing it and also for you just watching it right now so what I have here is just a random scrap of plywood if I had a slightly longer piece that would be ideal but what I'm trying to do here is basically get the width of the spade that I'm using that I'm going to stand right on top of the board like so and what this does is it makes it a template so now I can start with my edges like I normally do and then I could go up right against the board like so and just press straight down this will make it much more repeatable you don't have to worry about digging too big of a trench like inconsistently as you're going down the line and it just is more satisfying honestly so now I could even use the board as a little kick pad by going down and then stepping my weight on the board to flip this trench over all these horizons are now not where they once were but I'll tell you what I don't care about this soil here this is so compacted it is all clay I'm surprised it has as many roots as it has but it feels like a almost like a cement so I'm actually really happy we're doing this I think this soil here deep down it may not be compacted but it's definitely not what I want to see in terms of tilth I want a nice fluffier soil more like this rather than like something that comes up as a like almost rock I almost forgot the most important step which is the fork the double dig this is what's loosening our soil down low and making sure some of that amendment gets worked a little bit deeper so at this point I'm about halfway down the bed and I am feeling tired this is substantial work it looks like a little bit of a mess up front here but I'm not worried about it I'm trusting the process and uh I guess I'll meet you on the other side of this bed I don't know exactly how long that took somewhere between half an hour and an hour but we are now done double digging we have a huge kind of a mess honestly it looks really messy it's really tall it's crazy how much it inflates just through the act of digging that basically tells you how much compaction there really was considering we did add some compost but remember it was like maybe that much compost not enough to noticeably produce a volume like this so now we're at the end of the actual bed itself and what are we gonna do we have a channel but we have no soil to fill it in well that is where that initial wheelbarrow comes into play remember we scooped up the first trench threw it in a wheelbarrow that is going to get dumped in right here at the end of the bed so we've done is we've fully shifted all the soil over basically one foot in the process we've amended the subsoil we've added compost throughout and this in theory should now produce the best possible results out of this garden bed so i'm going to get that wheelbarrow dump it in here and then i'm going to talk about what i want to do next to clean this up a bit the final step i want to take right now is to basically deal with all of these giant clods now there's no way i'm going to break all of them and honestly i don't even know if it would be beneficial to break all of them i just noticed a piece of broken glass in here so that's the thing with a urban soil you never know what you're going to find when you're digging in your backyard so i will set aside this little piece of glass and that way it won't cut me in the future but now what i'm going to do is take this which is it's called a potato fork or a refuse fork you could kind of use whatever you have on hand even the shovel actually will do just fine and i'll show you what that looks like right now if you were to use a shovel and you didn't have a potato fork basically you're just going to kind of go like this you're going to do that a lot it's going to be a bit tiring so i would recommend having something like either a potato fork or even a classic garden hoe would actually be quite good at this and maybe i'll even go grab mine but first i want to go through and essentially hammer all the soil with the potato fork sort of smooth it out level it make sure it's evenly distributed and that will make this actually look like a proper garden bed and now it's looking like a proper garden bed it's still looking a little chunky maybe but i don't mind that at all all this should settle in nicely over time and honestly the fact that we do have these clods here to me is actually a great sign because what that means is that we've preserved the soil communities that live within this quad i did not entirely pulverize and destroy them so now they could continue to live and hopefully they're not in the wrong section too bad and what i mean by that is generally things that live 10 inches deep in the soil don't want to live on the surface of the soil because at the surface you have more oxygen so things that like more oxygen tend to live there things that prefer less oxygen tend to live further down in the soil profile so at this point this bed is effectively done but what i would like to do to probably overdo it maybe and supercharge this to the max is i want to sprinkle one more light layer of compost on top and honestly one of the main reasons i'm doing this is because i have a lot of compost on hand i just finished rebuilding my compost bins and in the process i basically developed six cubic feet of compost and that's a pretty substantial amount so i do have some good compost on hand and i'll basically scatter it in a little bit and then we'll move the irrigation back into place and then i'll see you guys tomorrow so yesterday we fully rebuilt this bed and i want to show a quick example of what it's like now the day after so we should be able to easily take something like a bamboo stake here and just plunge it into the soil with very little resistance so i'm going to just use a finger here just a single finger and i was able to easily go about 18 inches so if i were to actually use my whole hand here see how far i could get that's pretty good not bad for a penetration test into the soil so if i were to take the same stake here and try to push it into my native soil here that we didn't work on with all of my weight i was able to get maybe six inches instead of getting something like 18 inches into the well-prepped soil bed so that is what we want to see nice easy penetration that's exactly what the roots are going to do in the soil so the last thing we have to do here though is protect this bed we can't leave it exposed to the sun especially since we put so much compost on it we don't want this compost to get killed when the sun hits the surface of the soil it's not just drying it out and heating it up it's also going to be effectively sanitizing it using uv and compost is a living material so we don't want to let this entire thing go to waste by dumping all this precious compost on it and just letting it bake in the sun so the last step here is one that even if there's nothing planted in the bed i would say is absolutely crucial and that is to mulch this bed i want it entirely covered in straw that way the compost isn't getting cooked the soil isn't getting heated we're not getting evaporation it's already pretty warm here in san diego so i want to make sure that this bed has the best possible chance for success so yes it is a little bit annoying to have to bury all your irrigation lines and then transplant through the mulch but it's really worth it because otherwise why would we even bother making this compost in the first place if we're just going to let it get killed by the sun so that's pretty much it at this point this bed is super charged it's amended it has everything it needs to get growing and now i just have to figure out what i want to put in here i'm very tempted to just put tomatoes and peppers like i always do but i might slow down take a second to think about it i did start a lot of seeds recently so we have plenty of options but for now i'm not going to plant it today but i will end up mulching it let me know what you think about this double digging was it a waste of effort is this just stupid i should just be doing no-till practices actually just sort of caveat that point here let's go ahead and take the same bamboo stake see if you guys can see that on camera here i'm gonna go right into the garden bed right next to it that i haven't done any work on whatsoever it's just been planted as i always do so single finger test oh it's not actually going as far as i thought it would but if i take my whole hand it's actually pretty compacted so as you can see there is a difference between these two beds now will this last forever i don't know we'll have to check on it at the end of this season see how far i could plunge the stake into it but this is a great tool to get an idea of how compacted your soil is in this case there's no way this could be compacted after what we did to it yesterday so double digging jury's out is this a good idea it's something that people have been doing for decades and getting great results i am starting to think that i might have to go back to double dig every one of my beds not as an every year thing but maybe it's like an every other year thing to ensure that i'm getting good organic matter throughout my soil profile and that i'm making sure that nothing is compacted so let me know what you think down below is this a method that should go extinct should we all be doing low till or is this something that might work out for some gardens depending on the situation very curious to hear your thoughts i'll see you guys next time