This post series is my attempt to answer that question. (Mind you, this is only our second year of gardening on this land, so no doubt I have a lot yet to learn and some steep learning curves to climb.)
Regenerative growing practices on the urban backyard scale
Here's my back-of-the-napkin, off-the-cuff summary of key regenerative land management principles:
Disturb the soil as little as possible.
Always keep the soil covered.
Always keep a living root in the soil.
Plant more perennial crops.
Diversity, diversity, diversity!
Incorporate animals into the system, and have a system in place for rotating them through landscape.
Now, all of these can absolutely be applied even on the urban or suburban garden scale. Soil is soil is soil. There's nothing inherent about them that says you can only do them if you have 200 acres to manage.
Let's start with the first one. The way to disturb the soil as little as possible translates to:
No-till (or no-dig) gardening
No-till gardening is exactly what it sounds like: you farm, or garden without ever tilling the soil. Tilling and plowing are almost synonymous with land cultivation, aren't they? Yet they actually destroy soil structure, create compaction, and kill the very soil biology that's the basis of fertility, like fungal networks and all those earthworms that make the soil nice and squishy.
But if you don't till, how, then, do you break up and loosen the soil? How else do you kill all the weeds? How else do you build fertility?
In a no-till garden, these goals are achieved in a couple of simple ways:
1. Aerate using a broadfork.
This is a fun annual spring ritual. The broadfork allows you to gently fluff up the soil and improve its structure without turning it over completely. It's a garden chore my daughter loves doing with me — we rock back and forth, she can't stop laughing, I get good exercise.