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Arrggh!  I’m so sick of picking rocks!  I feel about rocks the way Samuel L. Jackson feels about snakes on a plane!
 Any Northland gardener can tell you that it’s easier to grow rocks here than most any other crop.  Coming from Florida, where our soil is made up almost exclusively of sand, rocks came as an unwelcome surprise.  In addition, the rocks are usually embedded in a layer of clay.  Were I a stonemason or potter, I’d be in good shape, but being a farmer, rocks and clay are my nemeses.  Our land was in serious need of soil improvement if this was going to work.
 The first thing I tried was buying a load of topsoil that came from an old farm and had years of manure mixed into it.  What I found was that it had plenty more rocks mixed in, too.  I couldn’t understand how every year I’d pick all the rocks out of the garden, and the following spring I’d find just as many when I tilled it again.  People kept telling me, “The frost brings them up.”  In that case, why couldn’t the frost spit them out onto the surface where they could be easily removed?
 So this year I decided to try raised beds.  Ha!  Let the frost try to bring the rocks up that far!  We’ll see.  Also, tilling is hard work, and raised beds would eliminate that annual necessity.  Garden beds are simply soft spots where you don’t walk even while tending them.  Raised beds are higher and can be enclosed with any number of things, usually wood, or they can simply be rounded humps of soil between the walking paths.  I chose to go with the latter because that way I could plant the entire bed including the sides.
 I’m a big fan of John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables and bio-intensive mini-farming.  But his version of raised beds recommends a process called “double-digging,” which involves hand spading the soil to a depth of two feet.  Not my idea of fun.
 I’m also a student of Carol Deppe and her book The Resilient Gardener – Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times.  She advocates dumping a mix of sand and compost right on top of the grass where you want the new bed and letting the worms dig it from below.  But both of these methods still require some amount of annual digging to maintain a loose soil structure.
 My desire to do as little digging as possible lead me to an interest in Lasagna Gardening as described by author Patricia Lanza.  I had tried Lasagna Gardening in Florida with success.  It’s sort of like making compost right in the bed rather than in a separate compost pile.  You just keep adding layers of organic material each year, and by spring, it’s rotted down and turned into beautiful soil.
 I decided to try a combination of methods.  The first thing I did was till the garden and pick out all the rocks, hopefully for the last time.  Then I raked the loose soil into four foot wide, twenty foot long beds about twelve inches high.
 I spaced the beds three feet apart.  This allows me to later build high tunnels (a type of unheated greenhouse) that will enclose a space two beds wide and as long as I want, with enough room to be able to walk all the way around the sides of the beds while inside the tunnel.  Use of tunnels can extend our growing season by a couple of months.
 I planted the beds, spacing the seedlings very close according to the How to Grow More Vegetables recommendations in a hexagonal pattern instead of rows.  As the plants grow, they create “living mulch,” shading out weeds.  Now I’ll begin adding layers of organic material as it becomes available.  After harvest, I’ll put down several more layers to prepare the beds for the next planting season.  By spring, I should be able to just plop the seedlings into the beds with little other preparation.  And no more picking rocks!