Asparagus bed continued

The next stage in preparing the new bed for asparagus is to dig it out and generally improve the quality of the soil there. Normally I would just do a double-spit dig, but I have a secondary objective which is to get rid of this huge compost heap that has been lurking in the garden for a few years.

With a double-spit dig, you dig over the ground to two spade-depths, and incorporate compost and manure as you go. But the compost is coming from my heap, and all the good stuff is at the bottom. So if I incorporate it as I go along, the poor compost from the top of the heap will be at one end of the bed and the good stuff will be at the other. I need to spread it all evenly along the length of the bed, so I am digging the bed out as a trench.

Here it is, together with the compost heap that will be buried in it. It's about 2/3 done. I have put the topsoil on the right and the subsoil on the left. You can see that they are quite different colours: the topsoil contains much more organic matter and is a greyish colour, whereas the subsoil is reddish. To add organic matter to the subsoil, I will put the compost in the trench, shovel the subsoil on top and mix it all up with the rotovator. Hopefully this will make for a soil that is fertile to a much greater depth than before.