A Third Choice: Trench Planting/Hilling

                Most organic gardening literature encourages using raised beds or double-digging (trenching) or a combination of the two to incorporate organic matter into the soil. I am experimenting with a third method for my well drained, droughty, sandy soil which begins by looking like double-digging and ends up looking like a raised bed but actually is neither and I think better than both. For the first step, I skim off my winter cover crop of ryegrass and put it on the walking path to the south of my east-west running wide-row growing bed. Next I dig out a shovel –wide, shovel- deep furrow and put that top soil in the garden pathway to the north of the bed.  The pathway to the north of the bed is now all top soil and the pathway to the south is all ryegrass sod. Next I invert the cover crop sod, roots to the sky, from the south pathway into the furrow trench and chop it into the subsoil bottom. (To this point, it sounds a lot like the double-digging method.) Then I pull a couple of inches of the top soil  from the pathway to the north of the bed into the furrow and let the whole trench rot and warm up as a stale seed bed and  skim- hoe out any weeds that emerge over  the next couple of weeks.  After a couple weeks I plant vegetable seeds into the furrow and allow the sweet corn or beans or what have you to grow up out of the trench and once they are tall enough I pull in the rest of the top soil from the north pathway and fill the furrow around the plant stem to natural ground level.  As the corn or bush beans or tomatoes etc. continue to grow taller, I hill them up with top soil from both the north and south pathways to the point that the hilled- up vegetable bed looks like a raised bed to the eye but it is not because the seed and its roots are not above the natural level of the ground as with a raised bed, but are deep in the soil on top of an organic water sponge with many inches of soil between them and the hot drying sun. The moisture is down deep and that is where roots are and that is what makes this method different from either double digging or raised beds. Many people probably use this method for growing their white potatoes but I think it can be used with a lot of other vegetable. If you have poorly drained soil, like clay, this furrow planting/hilling method will not work because when it rains you will just end up with a mud puddle. Another advantage to hilling is that three water- catching trenches are formed: both pathways are lowered to form trenches as soil is dragged out of them to hill the vegetables and a third trench appears atop the growing bed itself as it is hilled up, especially if two rows of vegetables are planted in each wide growing bed. This top trench makes it very easy and fast to water two rows of vegetables at once, even with just a watering can. Add a couple inches of temperature- moderating organic mulch on the sides of the hilled vegetables and you have gone a long way toward drought proofing your sandy soil.