The Cottage Smallholder

Double digging?  Far too much like hard work....even husband, who was always a bit of a masochist when it came to double digging, doesn't do it anymore, even with new beds.  He just keeps putting organic matter (like horse poo, mushroom compost which he buys in sacks really cheaply from a local nursery, and spent compost) on the beds, lightly forking it in.  As Iris says, the worms take it down and it improves the soil structure no end eventually.

I don't know if you've ever grown raspberries before.....if you haven't, then my advice would be don't plant too many - they are rampant thugs!  They grow extremely quickly and send up loads of runners everywhere - you'll quickly have a bed dominated by a forest of raspberries!  Husband made the mistake year before last of building a strawberry trough and fixing it to the fence behind the raspberry bed - great idea, he thought, will help keep the slugs and mice off them if they're raised up.  Only, once the strawberries were actually fruiting, we virtually had to hack our way, like jungle explorers, through the raspberry forest to get to them