Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Doug Willhite <drwillhite@earthlink.net>]

Down with raised beds
by Gene Logsdon

From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

The only raised bed I’ve ever found useful in sixty years of  
gardening is the one in my bedroom. And after I quit double-digging,  
I didn’t have to spend as much time there either. Or if I did, it  
was for reasons other than resting.

I must be wrong, but I don’t understand the modern enchantment with  
raised beds. Yes, if you are a market gardener, you will no doubt  
feel obliged to plant on raised beds to get the earliest possible  
crops but you can get early vegetables in unraised beds too. I have a  
very disgusting sister who plants peas in March here in northern  
Ohio, and often gets away with it, without raised beds.

If you want to plant a garden on an old parking lot (I have a hunch  
there will be many abandoned ones in the future) then by all means  
you will need a raised bed.  (It should give us all pause, however,   
to realize that plants can come right up through cracks in pavement  
and grow vigorously— so what’s that say about all our dearly held  
beliefs about gardening?) And definitely, if you want to plant a  
garden on something akin to swampland, you will surely want a raised  
bed. But the poorly-drained  soil under it will still “lay wet”  
and give you problems when your plants put down deep roots.

Other than those situations, raised beds guarantee only one result as  
far as I can see. You will have to irrigate more when dry weather  
comes and it comes quicker on raised beds. All of us gardeners pride  
ourselves in being eco-friendly. What is so ecological  about using  
water (and the power to pump it) when you can avoid doing so? Also,  
if you are bound and determined to make raised beds, a veteran market  
gardener just told me that you should be sure to mulch the paths  
heavily around the raised beds. Otherwise moisture will be drawn out  
of the bed even faster. So why not just go with unraised beds and  
mulch them?

My disgusting sister who gloats about having peas two weeks before I  
do without raised beds has been fertilizing her garden heavily with  
composted manure every year for at least half a century. Her soil is  
so rich you could stick a broom handle in it and it would grow. When  
you make soil like that, who needs raised beds?  Even she still has  
to replant some years because peas  have a tendency to rot rather  
than sprout  if it snows too hard after planting. Needless to say,  
that would also be true on raised beds.

I have almost the same kind of bias about double-digging. To turn  
compacted soils into a productive garden, double-digging makes sense  
the first year or two, I suppose. But I will bet a bushel of surplus  
tomatoes (from soil never double-dug), that if you have that kind of  
compaction problem, it will take quite a few years of mulch, compost  
and avoidance of unnecessary tillage to change it, and double-digging  
won’t speed up the time.

Please tell me how you increase the fertility of your soil, if you  
bury  unfertile soil on top with the unfertile soil underneath it. Or  
if the soil on top is fertile, why bury it under the less fertile  
soil underneath. If both the topsoil and the soil under it are  
fertile, is it not just loony to risk throwing your back out of whack  
by double-digging?   If compaction is the problem, shouldn’t you be  
attacking the cause?  Usually compaction comes when a clay soil needs  
underlying tile drainage. The impatient gardener roto-tills too  
deeply before the soil is sufficiently dried out and that happens on  
raised beds too.

Okay, so I’m being a little facetious here. Correct double-digging  
is not exactly the way I describe. It is even loonier. You dig up a  
spade’s worth of soil across the garden plot that you are about to  
desecrate. You put it in a wheelbarrow. Then you loosen up a spade’s  
depth below that. Then you dig up the next trench’s worth and put it  
where the dirt in the wheelbarrow had been, being careful to keep the  
topmost soil on top even though, and I just watched a gardener doing  
this, there is absolutely no difference between the soil on top and  
the soil four inches below it. And so you proceed until you have  
moved the top layer of soil over about six inches.  Then, if you have  
not yet slipped a disc or two, you put the wheelbarrow load in the  
last trench. Never in the entire process is the cause of the  
compaction, real or imagined, addressed and so the suffering double- 
diggers figure they must move the top layer of their garden over  
another six inches next year, until knee surgery do us part.

Maybe you have arguments in favor of raised beds and/or double- 
digging that I don’t appreciate. I’ll bow to your expertise if  
that is so. But since I get gobs more food from my garden than I can  
ever eat without these tortures,  why would I want to torment myself  
and end my gardening life too early?  I would rather spend that time  
in another kind of raised bed I highly recommend. A hammock.
~
See also Small farm web services and ecommerce for small farmers→
~~
Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in  
Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the  
Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land)
and The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life
OrganicToBe.org | OrganicToGo.com
Gene’s Posts
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks to Dave Smith, publisher of OrganicToBe.org


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