The 1 Thing You Need To Do To Start Your Bio Intensive Garden Right

Find out the one thing that your intensive garden needs to be successful and how to get started in your garden!

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Prepare the Soil for Intensive Gardening

This post is part of a new mini-training series! I’m passionate to help people grow organic food at home and have food security. You can join over 20,000 people who listen to the Homesteading & Gardening In The Suburbs Podcast and listen to this post by clicking play below or read on to learn more.

Why is the soil so important for intensive gardening?

The soil feeds your garden. When we grow a garden we have to feed the soil to then feed ourselves, our family, our friends, and our community.

The soil holds water and nutrients that your plants need to grow lush and abundant in the garden. Fertile soil makes your vegetables, herbs, and fruits taste better and have more vitamins and minerals to help your body keep doing what it does best: being YOU!

We need fertile soil to keep providing these nutrients to the plants each year that you grow a garden.

But what is good soil for a garden?

Think of soil like you are making a sponge cake. There are main ingredients that you need for your cake like flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. Soil is kind of the same way. Soil is made up of bits of sand, silt, clay, rock and minerals, water, air, and organic matter called humus. However, you need these things together in the right quantities to help make your soil sponge cake.

Good soil for a garden is often described as loam. It is made of sand, silt, and clay. It is ideal for most plants because it has the right combination of these soil ingredients.

Sand has large particles that provide space and aeration to the soil which is good for your plant roots.
Silt is medium-sized particles that absorb moisture and help mix the larger sand and smaller clay particles together.
Clay has the smallest particles, and they love to stick together which prevents oxygen from getting to the plant roots. But clay is packed full of nutrients that your plants love.

Loamy soil is like the perfect soil sponge cake for your plants.

Why is loam good?

Loam soils have the right balance of air (from the sand particles creating space), nutrient retention from the clay, and moisture retention from the clay and silt. Therefore, loam soil allows water to drain through fast enough so it doesn’t become waterlogged but slow enough that plants have access to moisture when they need it.

Do I have loamy soil?

There’s an old gardener’s trick for checking your soil. I always knew it as the ball test!

Pick up a handful of slightly damp soil and squeeze it into a ball then open your hand and see what the soil does.

If it does not form a ball, you have sandy soil.

Did the soil form a ball? Great! Now poke it with your finger.

If the ball crumbles and breaks, then you have loamy soil.
The ball doesn’t break or it can be molded into another shape, you have clay soil.

This loamy soil is what organic gardeners are aiming for when they are using intensive gardening. So let’s dig in and see how to change your garden to an intensive garden!

How to make bio intensive garden beds

To get your intensive garden off to the right start, you need to build your garden beds right and get that soil sponge cake going.

The best way to go this, it to take years of traditional gardening experience and do this 1 thing once in each of your garden beds.

Double Dig

Digging your garden beds helps you clean up the beds. Since you can see weed roots as you dig, therefore you can pull them out as you go!

Digging also helps improve aeration and drainage and you can add organic matter at the same time.

Double digging is the one thing you need to do in each of your garden beds. After that one dig, you won’t need to do it again!

What is double-digging?

Ok so I’m not going to lie, double-digging garden beds is hard work. It was the job my grandparent’s had me doing in the garden and the allotment as a kid. But there’s a great sense of achievement after you dig over the garden bed, seeing that nice slight mound that you made and the possibilities of the garden you will grow.

Oh yeah, let’s not forget the relief after you have finished double digging all the beds!

Double digging is where you are digging the soil 20 to 24 inches deep. You are basically digging over twice. Let me break it down for you step by step.

Using a sharp spade or shovel, dig a trench about 10 to 12 inches deep and as wide as the width of your shovel.
Dig out the soil on the shovel from the trench and move it to a tarp or wheelbarrow. Congratulations on making your first trench!
Now grab your garden fork and dig down another 10 to 12 inches into the trench.
Use the garden fork to turn the soil over inside the trench. Don’t dig out this soil.
This is a good time to add some organic matter and lightly turn it over or mix it with the garden fork in the trench.
Next, grab your trusty shovel again, step backwards on the garden bed and dig a new trench as wide as the width of your shovel.
Place the soil you are digging out from the new trench into the first trench.
Repeat from step 3 until you reach the end of the garden bed.
Remember that soil you dug out from the first trench? Use that to fill in the final trench.

Take a well-earned break and enjoy a cup of tea or a homebrew beer. You earned it!

Tips for successful double digging

Go slow!
Work in the cooler parts of the day.
Use a sharp shovel or spade.
Don’t try to lift too much earth at once. Smaller shovelfuls are better on your back!
Stepping backwards each time you dig a new trench means that you are not going to stand on the soil and compact it ruining all your sweat, tears and hard work! It also means you won’t over-reach when filling the trench.
If you are working in a wide area, consider making your garden beds smaller (no more than 6 ft so that you can reach in from both sides of the bed).
Enlist help from family and friends.
Don’t be afraid to do a little at a time and not the entire garden in a day.

How do I add humus and organic matter to the soil?

Humus is basically things that were once living that are breaking down. Organic matter in the soil helps to retain water and nutrients for your plants to grow. You can add organic matter to your soil with compost.

Learn how to start composting in a small garden right here.

The best way to get your intensive gardening beds off to a great start is to spread 4 inches of mature (or well-rotted) compost over the newly double dug garden beds. Rake the garden beds so they are mounted up but flat on the top.

Congrats! You are ready to start planting!

Learn More

This post is part of a mini-training series! Click the links below to dig in and learn more about intensive gardening.

Grow More Food In The Space You Have

Plant Spacings

Open Pollinated Seeds

Composting

Cover Crops

Integrated Pest Management

Training isn’t live yet? Check out some related posts below:

How are you going to prepare the soil for your intensive garden? Let me know in the comments or over in the Facebook Group!

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