Double Digging ?

[steviecarrot]

Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum and vegetable gardening.
When it comes to digging and double digging (when the allotment is cleared i want to use 4 beds for crop rotation.) Do you double dig the whole allotment, or can you get away with double digging 1 or 2 beds the first year and in the following years double dig the remaining 2 beds ?
Any advice on the subject would be gratefully accepted. Thanks S Carrot

[alex-adam]

Hi S Carrot and welcome to the Forum.

Double digging is a back-breaking task, so it might be best to DD one area you intend to use for beans in the first season, then as you rotate the crop, DD the next area the following season and so on.

[VirginVegGrower]

Bloke next to me double digs leaving the clods exposed for the frosts to break down. He always has lovely soil...pig!

[Pies]

Been working my plot for 3 years and have never double dug any of it,and i havent seen anybody on our entire site double dig.Thats not to say some dont, but if most were double digging i would have thought i'd have spotted it

[zazen999]

I dig weeds out and that's it!

[VirginVegGrower]

Us too, now (under control) and I've just bought that chappy's book "No Dig Method" - Charles somebody I think. Need to read it really.

[Thelma Sanders]

I didn't double dig as such, but forked over the top and pushed the fork deep into the 2nd spit and wiggled it backwards and forwards to break up the hard pan a bit. The bloke who had it before only ever rotovated the top, so the growing depth was quite shallow. It's a lot better now.

The bed that has the taters in always gets a good work over each year, what with planting the seed then earthing up and harvesting and it seems ok now the rotation has worked round the plot

[Shadylane]

I think you only need to double dig if your soil is really bad - like total clay or something. But even then there's easier ways round it. I minimal dig, ie I fork out weeds, tickle over muck and fork out the spuds. I feel sorry for the oldies on our site who spend hours of back breaking work digging their plots, but then again they may enjoy it. Personally I'm not a big fan.

[taff]

I'm not a fan either. I only single dug the beds I use...but in the future, all that will chnge. the soil is clay and where it's compacted [it's been lawn for years] I'll get the weeds out of i can, cardboard it, then throw a mountain of stuff on top of it.
I've been reading stuff [somewhat contradictory stuff] but I'm thinking it's the new way to go for me [well, for now anyway]

If it's really bad, double dig, if it isn't single or no dig

[Two_Sheds]

I only dig out brambles and spuds, that's it. My soil is sandy and there're no hard clods to sort out, and my bit's not been rotavated so a hard pan hasn't developed underneath the top layer

I let my worms & crops do the "digging" for me. The worms and deep roots of green manures do the tunnelling and let air in.

[Aberdeenplotter]

The idea behind double digging is really to help with drainage (breaking up the subsoil does that) but you will be able to grow vegetables without doing so or as some of the previous contributors have said, without digging at all. Most plants grow well enough in the top spit.

[planetologist]

I'm also converting compacted lawn on clay to vegetable beds. I'd recommend double digging the parsnip bed, it's easier than double digging to harvest, and I dug in some thick bean poles two spades, hoping they'd stand the autumn storms then and can be used in the same spot next year, as I've read that beans don't suffer soil born diseases much. Most other beds get dug one spit to start with, and after that only for harvesting roots. I also mulched two beds without digging and grew tomatoes and broad beans through the cardboard mulch ~6 months later and they did well.

[endymion]

We 'double dug' the whole of our new veg plot because we thought we should - because we were taking up grass, and our soil is very, very, heavy, flinty and stony clay that was badly compacted and had absolutely no worms. The area isn't anywhere near as big as an allotment though, and we don't grow potatoes because of blight, and because they're relatively inexpensive to buy.

We dug out the top 'spit' and put it in a pile, then loosened the lower spit with a fork and piled in loads and loads of home-made compost. Then the top layer of the next 'trench' was put into the hole, more compost was mixed with it ... and so on, until we'd done the whole area. We left it to be frosted, and to settle a bit before planting anything. The results have been good, even with the weird weather.

Once we'd done all this, and got most of it planted up, we realised we hadn't quite enough space so made it a bit bigger. We did it by using 'no-dig' - a layer of manure then thick, wet, cardboard topped with some cheap bags of bought growing compost straight on top of the grass, - There was no preparatory digging whatsoever, not even poking a fork into the ground to aerate it a bit. We poked holes through the cardboard, filled them with commercial compost, watered and planted. The results have been quite astonishing really, we can't see a difference between the two parts of this veg plot - and some of the squash we planted managed to run off across the lawn while we weren't looking!

So, from our experience, I'd say it doesn't really matter too much, although you'd probably need to at least loosen the soil for root veg. As long as there's some decent food for the plants they'll do their absolute best for you.

(But, as a rider, separate area we also double-dug has done appallingly badly.)

[Snadger]

Double digging isn't called 'bastard trenching' for nowt!!!!!!!