The Double Dig

Double digging a garden is obscenely hard. On one discussion board I read, someone compared it to no-till gardening. He can't be serious. Double digging is the equivalent of rototilling your garden manually. The only reason my garden is currently double dug is because my "muscle" (to whom I've been married for 30 years) works like a demon and is relentless. We were only three trenches in when I was ready to say "Forget this!" only in much more colorful language. He thinks I don't have any perseverance (Of course I do, how else did I finish a Ph.D. and write a book? I just don't have perseverance about Sisyphean tasks).

I'm following the guidelines set out by John Jeavons in his book How to Grow More Vegetables. Jeavons recommends a "double dig" to build soil quality. It works like this: Before you start your dig, you loosen the soil and dress it with a half inch layer of compost--it it needs it. I didn't have compost, so I purchased 6 bags of MiracleGro organic garden soil. I'm on my way to the $64 dollar tomato. (There's a book with that title--I plan to read it next.)

Anyhow, when you are ready to dig, you start at one end of your garden and dig a trench 12" deep. Yeah right. 9 inches down (I measured) I said "Looks good to me." We put the dirt we removed into a wheel barrow.

You dig the trench while standing on a board positioned next to the trench. Once you remove the dirt from the trench, you loosen the floor of the trench you just dug using a d-handled spading fork. Supposedly 12" deep again (for a total of 24"). Hmmm, I don't think so. I will say the d-handled spading fork was the only thing that worked the way the book said it would.

After you finish digging a trench, you move the board back 12" and push the 12 inches you've just uncovered down into the trench you just dug. Well, theoretically. Of course, in reality when you push that dirt forward into the trench you just dug, you still have to do more digging to create a new trench. The question is, Where do you put that dirt? According to How to Grow More Vegetables, you shouldn't be turning the earth so much as pushing it from one trench to another. We just never figured out how to do this. So the double dig is intended to keep the earth on the same level it was originally: supposedly you just move it and aerate it. But we ended up turning ours. Like I said, it's like manually rototilling your garden
Eventually, we got a bit of a rhythm down. My husband would dig. Then I would loosen the soil in the bottom of the trench with the spading fork. Then he would dig some more. The biggest problem was tree roots. We have lots of trees in our backyard and I think we were bumping into the end of their root systems. I'm not sure what this will mean for the garden. In any case we did end up with a garden ready for planting, although I'm not sure it can be legitimately described as double dug.

You can see that it did make a difference. The first picture shows us at the halfway mark and the picture on the bottom shows the finished product. As a last step before planting, I watered and fertilized with more MiracleGro--this time organic fertilizer. I never did receive my soil report so I decided to go with the tried and true. My grandmother swore by MiracleGro, or she would have if she had been the type of person to swear. And if she had double dug a garden, she might have had to resort to swearing.


Gardens are trendy right now. Everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. They even broke ground on a vegetable garden at the White House this week. It's the first, I believe, since the World War II era victory gardens. But not many people talk about how much work it is. The drawings in the book How to Grow More Vegetables (notice drawings, not photographs) show neat, straight lines in the trenches--drawn with a ruler, no doubt--and a nicely dressed, non-sweaty man daintily moving the earth. I'm ok with the hard work, especially since my husband is a maniac and did most of it, but unless you have hired muscle, be prepared for some really hard work if you undertake double digging.

As a side note, I'm wondering how anyone has time to both cultivate a garden and blog about it and have a real job. My respect for TennZen grows exponentially.

Next time...the adventure of planting!

Starting seedlings

So last night I started some seedlings. Then today I was reading TennZen's blog and realized how far behind I really am. She spent Saturday transferring her warm weather seedlings to larger pots and she's going to be ready to plant those seedlings by March 28. That's sort of a puzzle to me, since the last frost date for middle Tennessee is in April. Maybe she's in Memphis!

So anyhow, I started three of my cool weather vegetables--collards, sugar snap peas, and swiss chard--in my Jiffy seed starter. Not sustainable! Grow Biointensive advocates stress sustainability. Sustainability would mean making use of resources I have instead of buying materials and then recycling what I do use. By next year (or even by the time I do a fall planting) I hope to have flats I've made myself and my own compost and soil. But starting with the Jiffy seed starter is easy and not too complicated for the beginner.

To start the seedlings, I filled the little pots with jiffy starter soil, put seed in each pot, and watered them until the water seeped out the bottom of the pots. Then I covered them with the plastic top that comes with the kit. They are now in my greenhouse. Ok, they're in my living room. But it's the right temperature. I have no idea whether or when I should water them again. Guess I'll figure that out...keep your fingers crossed that little plants will appear soon.

My plan is to do my double dig this weekend--with pictures and an explanation--plant my potatoes and sow some of my cool weather vegetables directly to the garden. I'll start my warm weather seedlings in my "greenhouse" around the same time.

a riff on seed potatoes

Do you have any idea how many ways there are to prepare and plant potatoes in the home garden? And how vociferously people disagree on that process? Yikes. The biggest argument is whether to sprout or "green" your seed potatoes (aka "chitting" in the UK). Once you've decided to chit your potatoes, the question is how and for how long? Spread out on a sunny window sill? In a covered box? Out in the open but not in the sun? Cool temperatures? Warm temperatures? How warm? And how long 4 weeks? 6 weeks? just until 1" green sprouts?

Wait, you're not finished yet! Once they've sprouted, you have to decide whether to cut or not to cut. Small seed potatoes should be planted whole, but larger potatoes can be cut into pieces. Each piece should have at least one eye--or if you've sprouted them, one sprout, I guess.

Still not finished... If you cut them you have to decide whether to plant them immediately or allow a few days for the cuts to callus over!

Grow biointensive recommends sprouting 4 weeks before the last frost (technically I am still in that window--although barely), but doesn't give much instruction about how to do that. After I talked to Margo, I thought I understood. I went out and bought a bag of seed potatoes. I should have probably spread them out on a piece of newspaper and let them sprout. They had already started to sprout in the bag--but a couple of days in the warm would likely have added more sprouts.

Unfortunately, before doing more reading, I cut them into pieces--pieces that are likely too small. The pieces are supposed to be no smaller than a large ice cube. That's not a catastrophe, but the small pieces won't have as much nutrients to get started.

Also, now that I've cut them, I think they need to go in the ground fairly soon! That's actually ok according to my cold weather planting guide from the Co-op, which indicates that potatoes in Tennessee should go in the ground in March. (The Co-op apparently has no opinion on chitting!)

So here's where my options lie: Maybe two plantings. I'll plant the potatoes I've already cut at the end of this week, sprouted or not.

Then I'll buy another bag tomorrow, spread them out on newspaper and let them sprout for a couple of weeks and then plant them on the last day of frost--which is the timetable recommended in How to Grow More Vegetables.

It's an adventure!

The principles of grow biointensive gardening

To learn the grow biointensive method of gardening, I've been pouring over John Jeavons' book How to Grow More Vegetables. A couple of major principles distinguish Jeavons' methods from others. In general, Jeavons advocates an approach that is sustainable. In other words, he advocates a system in which resources used up are balanced by resources created. So instead of sending the aspiring gardener out to spend massive amounts of money on garden supplies and to plant crops willy nilly that deplete the soil, Jeavons recommends composting, crop rotation, and building soil structure, particularly through something he calls "the double dig"--more on that later. To get the maximum amount of produce from the minimum amount of land he recommends placing plants very close together instead of in rows and growing your own seedlings rather than buying seedlings or planting seed directly in the ground. 

Those are the basics. Simple, but still a little intimidating. The book gives detailed plans for how to develop a garden starting with 100 sq ft and I found myself getting bogged down a bit in the details. This morning I talked on the phone to Margo who has just finished a 3 year internship at Jeavons' Ecology Action institute. Margo gave me lots of encouragement and made me feel like I'm on the right track. Thanks, Margo!

Part of my problem is that I'm getting a bit of a late start--my seeds just arrived two days ago from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange--and my cool weather vegetables should have been started a couple of weeks ago so that I'd have seedlings ready to go now. But after talking to Margo, I think I have a plan. I've decided to plant seed directly in the garden as soon as things dry off a bit here and after I've gotten the results of my soil test back. I took a soil sample to the Co-op last Saturday and hope to hear something soon. My goal is to plant my cool weather crops no later than March 20. But I'll  start some seeds indoors too so that if my seeds planted outside start to falter, I can replace them with the seedlings.  

I'll start my warm weather seedlings about 2 -3 weeks before the last frost--which as everyone knows is a moving target. For middle Tennessee the last frost falls anywhere from April 6 to April 21. 

In the meantime, I'm off to start my seedlings!

A long time ago, in a boro far, far away...

My journey to becoming a gardener began when I was child and lived in Lititz, PA. Lititz Boro is located in Lancaster County which is really the center of the vegetable universe. Shortly thereafter, I became what my husband calls a vegetable priss. I'm also a coffee priss, but that's another blog. When I moved from Lititz Boro to Murfreesboro, TN, I was distressed to discover that there was no equivalent to Stauffer's of Kissel Hill (the premiere vegetable market near my home) and it took me over a decade (for reasons I still don't understand--it's less than a mile from my house) to find the Farmers' Market in Murfreesboro. In the meantime, I frequently lamented the dearth of produce in my new boro.

What started me on a serious search for better vegetables started with becoming a vegetarian for health reasons in 2001. Many of the blogs about vegetarian and vegan cooking made reference to eating locally and led me to exploring the Slow Food Movement. Then last spring I discovered Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver's lovely and poetic account of her return to her family farm and her family's attempt to spend an entire year eating only the foods they could grow themselves or secure locally. Inspired, I went in search of a CSA farm (Community Supported Agriculture) to buy my vegetables for the summer of 2008. There were many more of these available at this point than there had been when I first moved to the Boro in the mid-90s. I also began to frequent the Farmers' Market at least once a week. The vegetables I got through my CSA and through the market were wonderful and satisfied the vegetable priss in me, but I also began to itch to be part of the process.

So I bought John Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables and began to think seriously about my own garden. I don't mean to mislead. I am not a garden neophyte. For one thing, my father grew up on a farm. My mother spent a good bit of her early life on farm (we're from Pennsylvania, for crying out loud). And when I was growing up, my mother and grandmother never met a vegetable they didn't think could be frozen, canned, or pickled. I've spent more hours than I care to recall shelling peas and husking corn--rousted out of bed at an ungodly early hour to perform the manual labor in this operation. Over the years, my father kept a garden and waged war on groundhogs. Over the years, too, I've kept my own small garden--a couple of tomato plants, a cucumber plant, and some herbs, but most of it went to birds and bugs, the compost pile, and an occasional opossum.

Now I want to take on the project of gardening with more purpose and focus. I don't have visions of homesteading (I live in the Boro) and I don't even think I can grow all the vegetables we would eat--so I've signed up for a CSA again this year. But I think I can begin to participate in the process of growing food. It seems like the right thing for a vegetable priss to do. And it seems important to me to participate in the process of growing food. I feel like it's in my blood and it makes sense, too, given the way I eat. Last, and this one is the hardest to put in to words...it's also important to live in ways that are sustainable and the right kind of gardening can fit with that philosophy.

Ok, so that's why I'm gardening, but why blog this garden? Well, I'm having trouble finding other people in Murfreesboro or middle Tennessee who are using the Grow Biointensive method. So I thought it might be helpful to document the process in case someone else wanted to give it a try. I'm hoping some readers will find me and offer me their advice and good counsel.

Also, I thought it would be a nice way for my parents to see my garden. Hi Mom & Dad.