no worms for me

Even before I moved in to my house, I’d decided where I wanted my vegetable garden to be: the side yard which serves as an RV parking spot, right next to the garage. It is the sunniest spot and gets the morning sun since it faces east. It also happened to be bursting with weeds. If weeds love it, the soil must be great, right?

So, out with the weeds and… uh… what’s all this crap? Gravel, blobs of dried cement, bottle caps, a toy sheriff badge, golf balls, cable connectors? Looks like someone’s been using the side yard as a dump site.

After the weeds were cut down and removed, it was time to dig some vegetable beds! My gardening book explained about how to create deep beds using the double-dig method. Deep beds are more space efficient because they allow vegetables to be grown closer due to the deeper root zone. For a small garden, a deep bed (the inverse of which is a raised bed or planter box) is perfect.

With bursting enthusiasm, I asked my friends to help me dig a 4’x6’ rectangular bed that’s 2 feet deep.

D: You seriously want us to dig 2 feet into the ground?

G: Yeah! It’s gonna be easy!

The first 2 inches came off easily: the soil was a gorgeous black. But that was it. I only had 2 INCHES of topsoil! What lay beneath was the subsoil: hard adobe, also known as clay.

After an hour and a half of chipping away like prisoners in chains breaking rock, we managed to dig a 2’x2’ square hole that was only 4 inches deep. I declared defeat. No human strength is going to dig 2 feet into this slab of clay in time for spring planting. Time to bring in the machine.

People ask me why I spent 3 hours choking on clay dust, wrestling a jack-hammering rototiller in to submission, and shoveling in 2 cubic yards of compost. Why didn’t I just use the planter box system and throw some good soil in it?

My answer to that is also the main thing I learned from Organic Gardening: feed the soil. The soil into which we painstakingly plop little seeds into isn’t just a “root holder”. It is the very thing that gives life to our plants. Therefore, a healthy soil means healthy plants.

Online forums also advise avoiding abrupt soil transitions whenever possible. If I used a planter box without tilling the soil, I would have a sharp transition from loose, fluffy soil to impervious, hard clay. The two won’t exchange nutrients or water, which makes it just a root holder. And what did I just say about using soil as a root holder?

Using the rototiller did the trick, but I only got 8” deep. To give my plants more soil depth, I made a 11” high planter box (total of 19”, just 5” short of my original goal) for the vegetables and 8” high mounds (total of 16”) for the tomatoes.

After pushing my body to the limit breaking and forming the soil, I fell sick and it took me 2 weeks to recover. Was it worth all the hard work, calluses, debts to friends and colleagues who helped me, encounters with slugs, money spent on tools and medicine…. was the ideal of a healthy soil that would produce healthy plants worth all of that?

:-) Just you wait and see!