Hi everyone, I am new here. I have read Joseph’s book and done the course. I am planning my garden for next growing season (in Europe) and I am wondering how Joseph (or any of you) recommend preparing the soil in the garden bed for this kind of landrace growing. Do you till the area for the first garden bed, or do you do no dig, what is recommended? Thank you very much for your help 
I prefer not to dig, and do most of the composting on site. In fact, I slowly transform parts of a meadow with fruittrees and berries into partly vegetable garden patches. First I dump some seaweed or greens or browns from my garden. Next spring, I drag the remaings to on edge, and grow squah there. Then I pile up more organic material, to nourish and expand. The third year, I grow other vegetables, but always let the squash follow the tiny hills of organic transformation.
Whenever my patches gets too weedy, it’s time to start all over 
My garden is in Denmark, USDA 8a, shaded by the neighbouring wood.
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The approach you take depends on your local conditions and the resources you have on hand. Joseph tills before planting in spring IIRC because he cultivates a large space and has a neighbour with a tractor who can do it for him. His soil texture also handles tilling well.
I have a heavy cracking clay. Tilling and running machinery over it would destroy what little structure it has and compact the subsoil for decades. Plus I have no neighbour to do it, no machinery of my own.
The main factor for annual crops is finding some form of disturbance that can be leveraged to give your annuals enough of an advantage over established perennials and weedy annuals to give them a chance to compete and produce. You could do that with mulch, or animal pressure, or by growing weed suppressing perennials that you can cut back for long enough to grow annual crops (like happens in the inga alley system, but which I suspect might work for other tree species). Some systems use burning, others use controlled flooding, to create low competition growing spaces too. Or if you are unusually energetic you can do it with hand tools like hoes, or machinery (though this usually requires multiple rounds of tilling to tempt the annual weeds out of the seedbank). Some people also use herbicides these days, though I am sure plenty of people will dog pile that approach.
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Herbicide use can be a hot topic, but I won’t question someone else’s choices. Just remember that how you grow determines what your plants are going to expect in future generations.
This year I really didn’t get much chance for soil prep, so I planted straight into the grass, both along the mulch sheet and farther out.
As expected, some plants are thriving with this approach while others are struggling. I personally trend toward as little work as possible, so this fits perfectly. The plants that survive will be more adjusted to extreme weed pressure.
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Thanks for the responses :-). It’s so helpful.
I have clay soil, the land has been tilled for many years before we bought it. I was thinking to cover the area with black plastic until next spring and hopefully the area underneath would be ready for planting in April/May.
It’s such a cool method, to do as little as possible to the soil and just let the fittest survive. Very exciting.
My basic approach is to mulch heavily with hay. If there are difficult plants to smother like couch grass I put down newspaper or cardboard before laying the hay. I also dig an edge to sever the connection between what’s under the mulch and the outside world. We try to give existing beds an annual dressing of ash, charcoal then either compost or scrapings from the chicken yard.
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This is a great idea about cutting back the edges. I have noticed that there can be a buffer zone of 1 to 2 feet under whatever I’m using to occultize turf. I had concluded that nutrients were coming from the areas that were not covered but I hadn’t thought about severing the link physically.
I mostly use cardboard laid directly on the ground and held with rocks for a couple months. I have used plastic tarp for this purpose too. If the cardboard is placed on the ground in the fall or early winter, it tends to be dissolved enough by the spring to be able to plant through.
I don’t think it is as essential to lay wood chips or something else on top of the cardboard here as it is in other environments. Possibly because it’s so damp in this climate, but I’m not sure.
Hi everybody I enjoyed it reading what you guys do but on the subject of herbicides I only have a 10x15 garden plot and I rent till I can’t really do a lot about it but apparently they used harbor freight sometime before I got here and I have a hard time growing tomatoes and and beans and some cucumbers so that kind of reduces my garden space to about 10x9 but corn will grow over there in that space doesn’t seem to have a problem like reading what you guys say about all this my plants are too small to say too much about them because I drink so somebody tomato plants are still quite small here in northern Maryland because we had a dry spell and they don’t come up very good when it’s dry thank you all Larry
Solarizing like this is a great idea in my opinion. It’s how people establish new meadows from lawns, and it’s generally the best way of killing grass. You can plant into grass if you have the right kind of conditions, but I’d recommend solarization or doing a surface tillage (2-5cm) until you’ve saved some seed that you can trust in your microclimate.
In such a small space, lasagna gardening may be ideal to kill off the weeds and plant right into the space on top. That’s what I’m doing with my front yard right now, in an effort to get rid of my grass and start a xeriscape planting of drought tolerant edible ornamentals.
One technique for pushing out perennial grasses and weeds I havent seen mentioned anywhere is one that I have recently figured out works pretty well. I have previously used black plastic to solarise before planting, but don’t fancy the chemicals it leaches (or the microplastics when it disintegrates in the sun) but the end result is pretty effective. I have also done the paper/cardboard mulch approach but don’t want to rely on industrial waste paper and machine processed mulch.
I have gardened without mulch, just with weed growth managed by regular hoeing, and it worked very well. I planted vetiver grass around my growing space to stop running grasses creeping in from outside. The vetiver grass needs regular cutting, so I now have an abundant supply of coarse mulch (leaves 1-2 m long).
To reclaim weedy fallow beds I now pile up the vetiver grass I cut with a hand sickle after trampling it flat. I pile it on so deep it smothers the weeds within a few weeks/months depending on the weather. When the weeds are dead enough I move the vetiver mulch to the next weedy bed. I find I can do two beds at a time without having to move the mulch too far. It functions like a kind of wave periodically passing over the growing space since I normally abandon beds to the weeds after a couple of seasons. Any of the vetiver that has broken down too much to move easily gets left behind as a bit of extra organic matter. I top up the mulch with fresh cuttings after moving it.
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Vetiver grass sounds nice because the roots grow down rather than sideways and it seems like a good option for binding up the facing edge of swales so they don’t dry out and as sort of a rhizome barrier. I’ve been establishing clovers but they need a little bit of work as they spread. Using Vetiver as chop and drop on the adjacent bed has an appeal as well. There must be a similar option for a colder zone 6…
Theoretically Eastern gemagrass Tripsacum dactyloides could fit this bill. I relocated what I hoped were some bunches of it from my sister’s place to mine over the winter, but it was either grazed to death or died of other natural causes.
This is how far my fig leaf squash have grown since july 6.
It prepares my lawn for more food growing.
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The fig-leaf squash plants look amazing! I love the way you have them growing between fruit trees, too. 