Inspired by our Biointensive series with Laura Lengnick, I've continued to implement Healthy Soil Practices into our garden design. The beds pictured have grown strawberries for the past three years. The yields have consistently been abundant thanks to the help of volunteers rejuvenating the plots each year by thinning the plants down to one plant every six inches in rows two feet apart.

Despite good yields, I wanted to give the soil a break and rid the site of many of the invasive weeds (mugwort and grasses in particular) which have inhibited yields in portions of the beds. To begin, I had volunteers double dig the beds, which are each three feet wide and stretch over 50 feet. Then during a major garden work day I had volunteers build the windrows pictured.

We started by laying sticks on the soil surface then adding a layer of green material (weeds pulled from a neglected community garden bed), then a layer of straw and a sprinkling of soil. The soil acts as a microbial inoculant to the pile. As Laura explained in her first lecture, one tablespoon of healthy soil has more beneficial microorganisms than there are people on the planet! After we added all the layers, we watered the pile well. We continued building the pile until it reached a height of around 3 feet.

The pile will remain on the bed until next Spring when I will incorporate it into a number of beds. The beauty of this system is that it expands the scope of how to use a bed in the garden and how to meet the standards for healthy soil.

I love walking by these windrows; not only are they beautiful in an aesthetic sense, but also in an organizational sense. I've taken compost out of the bins and directly into the garden.

Since finishing these windrows we've begun building a windrow on another bed which has not been double dug yet and in which we grew early potatoes. After digging the potatoes, the ground was hard and formed large clots. I'm curious to see how building the windrow on this poor aggregate will change the soil structure.

Another difference in this second windrow is that we are able to use carbon produced in the garden--corn stalks. The first windrow was built with purchased straw--which ultimately means our garden fertility depletes soil fertility somewhere else. I am tentatively estimating that we will be able to produce enough compost from our cornstalk windrow to feed all 16 of our 400 square foot beds in the Plant a Row for the Hungry portion of our garden.

Picture credit: Annie Price