Jeff Fry - Preparedness Gardening: How to Grow Real Sustenance and Naturally Build Soil Fertility in Troubled Times

Breaking ground for the first time can be a thrilling processand impart a real feeling of accomplishing something meaningful with yourhands. For small plots (say, lessthan 500 square feet), you have several methods available to you:

1) Themost luxurious, bound-to-create-a-thriving-garden method is to create amultilayered sheet mulch, also regrettably referred to as lasagnagardening. There are differentways of doing this, but the idea is to smother what is growing, usually grass,with a thick compost-in-place and then grow directly out of it the followingspring after the material has at least partially broken down and natureshelpers have gently begun digesting and tilling in the materials. This can be as simple as cardboard witha layer of mulch or compost on top (a little dicey) or a complex, multilayeredcompost bed. Permaculture authorToby Hemenway outlines his ultimate sheet mulch ashaving first a thin layer of slashed vegetation, followed by soil amendmentslike rock powers, a thin layer of manure, newspaper or cardboard a half inchthick, more manure or nitrogenous material a half inch thick, 8-12 inches ofstable bedding or other bulk organic matter, another inch or two of compost,and finally a couple inches of straw or leaves (87-90 Gaias Garden). Itmight go without saying that this is only suitable for very small spaces as thevolume of material here is enormous.

2) Rotarytilling: Probably the most common on the home- and market scale, rotary tillingshould prepare your garden bed as well as irritate the bejeezus out of you. It is crucial to note,though, that how many passes you must do to sufficiency till your grounddepends on your ground and your tiller. A high quality walking tractor can handle just about anything but lessermodels may not. My lowly tillercould not really manage even a thick sod, or rocky ground, or dusty or hotconditions in short, nothing other than already prepared garden soil inagreeable weather.

3) Byshovel: Slower, yes, but the quality of the tilling is much better. Most grasses can be killed completely byflipping the sod upside down. Thisis also a resilient method of breaking ground in the sense that it requiresnothing more than you (and hopefully some helpers) and a shovel(s). In about a week of irregular bouts ofwork, I broke roughly 3000 square feet of ground using this method two seasonsago with a helper for half of that time. The method is simply to bite off chunks of sod and flip them on theirside or head, then move a step to the side and repeat. Leave them die upside down for a week ortwo, do more tilling and chopping if necessary, and rake the bed level.
It should be noted here that some intensive garden bed styles encourage adouble-digging where you shovel two shovels down roughly two feet to deeply aerate and fluff the soil. Having spent a season using this method,I can confirm that it is feasible in a small space only because it isoutlandishly labour intensive and anyway not necessary as healthy soilbiota together with smart cover cropping will aerate your soil, the latter ofwhich is the goal of good soil management.

4) Bychicken power: If you have chickens, you will already be perfectly familiarwith their ability to turn an area into a patch of moon where nary a blade ofgrass or bug shall exist. They willturn sod into manure and eggs, have a good time doing it, and entertain you toboot. Some additional wood chips orother organic material tossed into the patch will lesson compaction, which thechickens will also do. After theyhave done their work, a cover crop can be planted to further build the soil forthe next season; or you could feasibly plant a late season crop after somehoeing or tilling to loosen up the ground. How long it takes depends on the space, the ground, how many chickensyou have, and what kind of chickens.