Super Cultivator

This past Spring, I tried a lazy bed, or double dug bed for my garden. This entails digging a trench about two shovel widths wide, four or five feet long, and one shovel deep. This is the width dimension of your lazy bed. Cart this soil to the end of the bed, about twenty feet away, then return to the initial trench, and using a garden fork, loosen the soil at the bottom of the trench, down another foot or so. Now, dig another trench beside the first, dumping the soil into the first trench, and repeat the soil loosening operation. Continue to repeat this process until you reach the soil from the initial trench which will top the last trench. When you're done, you have a bed of soil, loosened about two to three feet deep.

The rationale behind this, is that it allows the rapid development of a larger root structure, requiring less water to grow a given amount of biomass. This is an old Irish tequnique, and the reason they're called lazy beds, is that weeding becomes a trivial endevour, as the weeds are easily pulled up by the roots from the loosened soil.

Working of compost into the bed is recomended (compost theory is complex, and another subject), and the system worked out by John Jeavons (I'll try to find a link) consists of digging these beds in sets of three, harvesting one, and planing the other two in a nitrogen fixing, green manure - fava beans usually, then turning the lot after harvest, and repeat the process next season - rotating the beds so that each lies fallow for two years, while working organic matter into the soil. This increases soil fertility, and helps to retain water, being basically a method for "growing" rich, organic soil, with out recourse to importing fertilizer, and reducing both water usage and salinization rate.

As I said, I tried this - I had to add some organic steer manure, and triple phosphate, as my soil is very alkaline, and previous crops of Tomatls have suffered from cracking. I planted Tomatoes, and mulched with some spoiled hay I got for free, to cut down on evaporative losses, (another entire subject) and in spite of a hot dry summer, I have a bumper crop of Tomatls, and I only watered about five times all summer - about once every two weeks, although I forgot about it for about a month, with no rain, and the plants weren't even wilted, they just didn't get any bigger. This is probobly less water than I use in a day with showering and head, etc.

The drawback to this for most people, as well as for large scale farming, is that the beds are very labor intensive to dig initially, and every year, the process must be repeated, although the digging gets easier. I had read an article about how after the end of the cold war, there had been some attempt made to convert tanks into tractors, and that this was pretty half baked, and these tractors used way too much fuel. So I thought, why not use them to dig lazy beds? Conventional tractors are not powerful enough to dig the three feet or so into the soil to loosen it sufficiently, but a tank might be.

Biointensive planting, which requires careful attention to spacing, creates a microclimate beneath the plant canopy, reducing evaporative loss, and is used to maximise yields, producing more food from a smaller space.

Thought I'd share this with you all, you never know when this trivia might come in handy.