Biointensive gardening, a method of growing food crops that can be traced back to ancient civilizations and, more recently, to European market farmers, was brought to the US by English master horticulturist Alan Chadwick. It has been popularized in the US by John Jeavons, author of How to Grow More Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine, and Lazy Bed Gardening. Jeavons practices biointensive farming on steep, tough terrain in Mendocino County California.

The Right Way
To do biointensive gardening, you have to double dig a bed by hand. Here are instructions on how to do it:

1. Mark the area where you want the bed.
2. Remove sod if necessary.
3. Loosen the soil.
4. Using a shovel, dig a trench one foot deep and one foot wide at one side of the bed. Put the soil in a bucket or wheelbarrow. Then, with a spading fork, loosen the underneath layer another foot down.
5. Moving backwards, repeat this process, but put the top 12 inches of soil in the trench you dug just before.
6. Work your way in this fashion to the end of the bed. Place the soil you removed from the first trench in the last trench.
7. Work compost and organic fertilizer into the top six inches of soil.

Why garden organicaly?
Life in a healthy garden is a strong tapestry of many strands, woven together, interacting to keep any one organism from dominating and causing problems, says Jeff Cox, columnist for Organic Gardening magazine, host of the PBS television series Your Organic Garden and Grow It!, and author of 13 books on organic gardening and landscaping. As there is in the American Constitution, he says, there’s a system of checks and balances.

Given this perspective, it becomes obvious why poisonous chemicals, whether fertilizers, fungicides, insecticides, or herbicides, wreak such havoc in a tightly knit system. These chemicals tear apart nature’s carefully constructed and balanced web of life. Suddenly certain creatures are released from predation and begin to multiply unchecked. What was once merely a happy player in the garden becomes a problem.

But organic gardening is not just about gardening without chemicals. The organic approach is to maximize the diversity of life in the garden. The more kinds of creatures that inhabit a system—whether garden, farm, or rain forest—the healthier it is. Each creature has an ecological role to play. Microorganisms decay fungus strands. Fungus helps disassemble the fallen leaves. Ladybugs eat aphids. Birds eat ladybugs.

Mice eat birds’ eggs. Foxes keep mice in check. And finally, when the foxes die, microorganisms break down their bodies.