• Double Digging, Day 1–or—From Flab to Abs in 170’?

    After several years of trying to improve our soils here at the Backyard Institute, this spring we decided to take drastic measures for some lower-performing portions of our annual garden beds. Today, I started double digging a la John Jeavons’s biointensive soil-preparation method. Normally, I would attempt another sheet mulching (laying down cardboard, manure, and straw), but our soils are not responding to this typically awesome treatment. We think that our huge Siberian elm tree’s huger root system is wringing our soils dry. One good reason to use Jeavons’s method is that it chops up these kind of root systems, and this will give our starts a fighting chance.

     

    Sheet mulching takes some work (Check back for future posts about sheet mulching!), but it is much less labor intensive than double digging. Today, I got through a 20 square foot area in several hours of strenuous digging. Yippee! Only 150 square feet to go! At least my biceps and abs will be in better shape for my upcoming high school reunion! Hmmm. Sometimes I wonder if every pain-in-the-ass challenge might have a purpose after all.

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SUSTAINABILITY
The final frontier.


These are the musings of an engaging enterprise.
Its thirty-year mission:


To create a greener planet.


To seek a better life in our lumbering civilization, and


to slowly go where we are all are headed anyway.




GRADUAL
GREENING

Is an unproven system for generating wide-spread sustainability.


it asks for 10 minutes a day for a year. At the end of the year, it asks for 10 more.


So in the second year, you spend just 20 minutes a day, in the third year, 30 minutes.


If you keep up this pattern, 27 years later you spend over 4 hours per day being extremely green.


Share Here!
Describe your attempts At a sustainable life.