Trench Gardening

Winter is upon us and this is a great time to consider a soil rehabilitation program for your garden, especially if you are dealing with an inhabitable clay or sandy soil. The soil rehab program, which I call trench gardening, admittedly, requires a fair amount of work but I believe you will be amazed at the results that can be achieved by this simple gardening technique. Organic gardeners are going to be particularly pleased with the vegetables they produce in a trenched garden. In some ways a trenched garden is similar to a raised bed except that it is buried in the ground rather than being above the ground. There are no fixed rules for the size of the trenches or, for that matter, the positioning of the trenches in a garden. However, as a general rule of thumb, I believe the more trenches and the closer they are positioned to each other the better. In this respect, one 30 foot long 8 foot wide section of my garden is a solid two foot deep trench consisting of about 65% organic material, 25% earthworm castings and 10% native clay soil. However, most gardeners who use the trench gardening technique, construct 1 foot wide and 1.5 foot deep trenches (the wider and deeper the trenches the better). The trenches run the length of the garden and are positioned 3 to 4 feet apart. The trenches can be filled with any organic material that one has available. I fill my trenches with primarily with horse manure, fir sawdust and oak leaves. The sawdust is mixed in with the manure I attain from a local stable. If it were available in large enough quantities, I would add food scraps to the mix. Several authors, who write about trench gardening, recommend that composting earthworms be added to the material in the trenches but this is not necessary if the trenched material contains horse, cow or some other form of manure because these animal wastes invariably contain composting earthworms. In fact, red wiggler composting earthworms are commonly referred to as manure worms because they are invariably found in manure throughout the world. In any case, plants and vegetables are planted beside the trenches so that their roots can have access to the rotting organic material that has been placed in the trenches. For a gardener raising organic vegetables it doesn't get any better than this! The following winter one can dig another trench adjacent to the initial one and repeat the process. If the trenched gardening technique is continued for a few years, depending on the size of the garden and the width of the trenches, the soil in the entire garden will have been converted from the initial inhabitable clay or sandy soil to a wonderful organic rich loam ideal for raising almost any plant or vegetable. I hope you have found this blog to be of interest, please consider becoming a member of my blog.