One of my best friends is moving to the eastern side of Washington State, where much of the land is under agricultural production. She is joining her fiance, who happens to be a professional seed farmer, on their 5 acre rural plot of land.
My friend, Kristen, is excited to have room to start a garden and raise some chickens. She grew up with a mom who gardened big, and loves green and growing things, but has been living an urban, apartment-dweller, professional-musician
Kristen had been reading up on gardening techniques, and called me for my opinion on double digging. Our conversation went something like this:
“Hey, Erica, I was reading this great book by a woman who gardens in New York, and she said she double digs her plot and can basically shove her arm into her soil up to her elbow.”
“Yeah, double digging is a great technique to establish new beds, it helps give the plant a lot more root room when you have limited space to work with.”
“So I was thinking I should try that at my new place.”
“Um, sweetie, don’t you have, like, five acres?”
“Yeah, plus about 40 acres of field space we can use if we want it.”
“And doesn’t your fiance have professional farm equipment he can use?”
“Oh yeah, he has a tractor and a huge rototiller…he has all that stuff.”
“Okay, here’s the thing: double digging is a technique that is really, really labor intensive. It is a great way to give vegetables more root room down when you need to space them really closely because you’re gardening with very limited space. But if you have 5 acres, why not just give your vegetables more root room by spacing them out? It’s not like you are going to run out of room.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. So, no double digging?”
“Definitely not.”
Now, let me be clear: I am not knocking double digging. It is a fantastic way to establish deep, loose growing areas, and I do it myself when I’m establishing new beds. But it is as silly to manually double dig 5 acres in the country as it is to tractor-till my suburban backyard.
The right tool does the right job. It’s easy to get caught up in the possibilities of a certain method when you are reading glossy pages by a renowned expert and memorizing impossibly fresh photos of cabbage the size of a toddler. It’s easy to think you must double dig, or garden by the moon, or companion plant perfectly to be successful. But really, there is no one right way to garden.
There are hundreds of books espousing hundreds of different gardening methodologies – French intensive, biodynamic, square foot, Mittleider Grow Box, hydroponic, permaculture, open field, raised bed, strict organic, IPM, and on and on. All of them have been developed to suit the needs of the developer and all work wonderfully – for someone.
Perhaps you’ll try Square Foot and realize you like to grow in quantity and 144 square inches is way too confining. Or maybe it will be just the thing to make gardening for your small family manageable and enjoyable. Perhaps you’ll research Biodynamic and decide the cow horn thing is way too woo-woo for you. Or maybe you’ll feel inspired to create your own agricultural organic holon.
All the techniques I’ve read or tried have had something valuable to offer. One of them might be exactly the “off the shelf” solution you need for your own garden, but I doubt it. More likely you’ll find, as I have, that your unique situation requires a unique set of solutions.
The one technique I can advocate for every situation is observation. Every garden will benefit from a gardener who spends time observing the plants, the pests, the weeds, the growth process. Observe the techniques you try in action – assess them, grade them.
Ask questions – “did 16 beets per square foot work or did my plants outgrow that spacing before sizing up?” – and honor your experience with honest answers. Careful observation speeds up the slow education of experience doled out seasonally.
There are many paths to success in the garden, and no gardener walks exactly the same one. But if you watch where you’re going, it’s a joy to amble.
Do you use specific gardening techniques, or have you developed your own system and methods over time?
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If you want to hear one of the best singer-songwriters …um… ever, I encourage you to check out what my friend Kristen is doing. Here’s a few songs to get you started. You can hear more of her amazing work on her website, KristenWard.com.
I think the watching thing is so important. We double-dug an ungodly amount of space. Think close to 200 sq ft and that shit is LABOR intensive.
We were also working with a space that was like a compacted clay baseball field. We have the only undrainable soil in Western North Carolina. Seriously only .01% of the soil in our county is like ours… Anyway off the subject.
After using most of the biointensive techniques I still had to add some organic fertilizer on top of my compost. Also carrots just need more than the recommended space. Anyway thanks for reminding me to keep researching and make more garden notes for next year.
Given that this is my first year at the community garden, we haven't done too much in the way of special techniques or whatnot (although now I'm curious about double digging). I'm trying to keep an eye on how things are growing, though, in the hopes that once we see what we've got we can make further and more specialized adjustments for next year.
Enough about the gardening – thanks for the music! Love her voice. I have some good friends in Wenatchee – it's different over on the East side of the mountains that's for sure. Good luck to her!
Great post, beautiful music!
WHEW! Your friend Kristen can belt one out.
l,
brenda
Great post! I could NOT agree with you more! When I work with groups of people who want to get started with gardening or who want to get more out of their gardening, the hardest thing for them to understand is that there are dozens of different ways to do things and THEY ALL WORK! The key, of course, is to find those methods that work best for you, in your garden and in your micro-climate.
I have beds that are double-dug. I compost like crazy. I use raised beds. I use sub-irrigated pots and beds. I use native soil supplemented up the ying-yang and I use carefully created soil mixes where everything is measured and sifted. They all work because they all do what they are designed to do, grow plants.
Once we get past the idea that we have to learn how to garden and actually stick some seeds in the ground, we can have some fun and grow some wonderful food.
Thanks again for the great canning book. Totally new ideas for me. And you know what? They work, too!
Man, would I love to take some help in the form of a tractor! Or even a horse and plow. But we primarily use raised beds. When we first started three years ago with one 4'x16' bed at our rental house we went with SFG, but damn that "Mel's Mix" is wicked expensive! So when we put in our 13 4'x8' beds at our home we decided against following that precise prescription for purely practical reasons. Also, I found that the plant spacing was wayyy to close together, unless you are severely pruning or picking super young.
We are trying a mix of techniques now, including close spacing (but not as close as SFG), vertical gardening, container gardening, and intercropping (is that like the seasonal version of permaculture?). We compost, make compost tea, keep chickens (chicken poo compost!) and ducks (having birds motivates me to pick bugs and weeds). We mulch and drip irrigate. But mostly we endeavor to have a "let's try it and see what happens" attitude, be flexible, and learn and improve as we go.