2018 was not a great season in the gardens, at least not for me here in Ireland, with
the drought, numerous distractions, the fire damage, and the fact I taken on too much.
All of the 7 family scale gardens suffered in a different way, but perhaps the
Simple Garden did the best.
Although the yield from this garden was about 75% of what it had produced the previous year,
overall it was a better harvest than in the other gardens.
It seems that this gardening method is more resilient to the stresses the season brought,
perhaps most significantly it was a lot easier to manage during the busiest and most problematic
times of season.
Having completed the second growing season for this Simple Garden method that I've developed,
it's starting come together and to become more refined.
And I'm beginning to understanding how to better manage this significantly different
gardening method.
The season started last year with the entire garden covered with a ground cover fabric,
and it had been covered all winter since the crops were harvested the previous autumn.
Not only did this protect the soils from the heavy winter rains, it prevented a lot of
weeds from growing, and it made my job a lot easier last spring.
It also allowed for a lot of sheet composting directly on the surface of the soil, which
is the main input of fertility and carbon into this garden.
It is a bit of work to pull back the fabric to add more material, but it’s a lot less
work than it is managing a compost pile, and I think it also greatly increases the soil biodiversity.
This covered sheet composting method was easily able to handle huge batches of messy material
for composting, which would have otherwise overwhelmed the other composting systems that I have.
Most significantly, I dumped many wheelbarrow loads of spoiled windfall apples, that had
been blown down in a really bad storm at the end of 2017, plus loads of pulp from pressing apple juice.
It was really big big piles of really messy stuff, and I wasn’t sure if it was a good
idea, but it seemed to decompose quite well hidden away under the ground cover fabric.
But I only sheet composted on the 1/3 of the garden that I was going to grow squash on
last year, and this crop seems to thrive in this really fresh fertility.
I grew the same number plants of the same variety of squash as I had the previous season,
and once again transplanted them in between the two sheets of fabric that were covering
the sheet composting.
The crop did essentially the same as it did the previous season, with about the same number
of squash harvested, and the same total weight, but I think that the squash was more ripe
and more flavourful in this second season.
Squash is a problematic crop to grow in the maritime climate of Ireland, but last season
the extra heat definitely helped, and it seemed to balance out the negative impact of the
drought, at least in this garden.
This particular crop also benefited from the crop cover that I had stretched over big plastic
containers of water, with the thermal mass and shelter giving these freshly transplanted
plants a head start for a few weeks.
The extra fertility from the sheet composting would have boosted the yield from this garden,
compared to some of the other gardens, and I wonder if the increased soil biodiversity
would have helped as well.
Perhaps the black fabric added some extra warmth during the season, but at least the
lack of weeds eliminated any competition, and the reduced evaporation for the soil no
doubt helped as well.
There was lots of space for the vines to grow into, though there never seems to be enough
space for these crops, and it seems that the squash roots had spread out to compete with
the potato plants.
Even though the two crops were about 2.4m apart, I did notice that the row of potatoes
closest to the squash seemed to have a reduced yield of smaller tubers.
This potato crop did poorly in general, with only about 60% of the yield of the previous
season, and I think the extended dry period was the main issue, even though I had watered
quite a bit.
There could also have been issues with the soil, as this bed had never been dug before,
so was still quite firm, and perhaps too compacted.
I wonder if a deep loosening of this soil before planting the potatoes would have helped.
There had been lots of material composted on this bed the year before, but the squash
crop may have used up a lot of the available fertility, or at least further imbalanced
the soil nutrients.
I had added some chicken manure pellets to the trench when planting the potatoes, in
anticipation of possible fertility issues, but it didn’t seem to be enough, and the
dry conditions may have made things worse.
Unfortunately I only grew this main crop variety of potatoes in this garden, so I didn’t
have another similar crop that I could compare it to.
When I first established this garden for the 2017 season, the bed that was going to grow
potatoes had been fully dug before planting, and dug again during harvesting.
This loose soil was then raked into seedbeds after harvesting the potatoes, covered with
the fabric over the winter, and this created well prepared beds for carrots and onions
this past season.
When I uncovered it in the spring it revealed a beautiful seedbed, with very little extra
work needed to prepare it for sowing.
The later sowing of the main crop of carrots gave the remaining perennial weed roots time
to regrow, as well as the volunteer potato plants from the tubers that I had failed to
harvest, all of which were very easy to dig out.
I had pulled off the fabric a few weeks before I planned to sow the carrots seeds, which
allowed any existing weed seeds time to germinate, and I flame weeded the whole bed with a torch.
This simple technique got rid of most of weeds, and definitely reduced the time needs later
in the season to pull out the weeds that had grown among the carrots.
The carrot harvest this past season was about 75% of what it had been the previous season,
possibly due to the drought, and it probably would have helped if I had thinned earleir
and watered more.
The onion sets had been planted earlier in the season than the carrots, and it definitely
helped having the bed prepared in the previous autumn, especially with the wet and cool conditions
that we had this past spring.
The yield of onions was only 64% of what I had harvested in 2017, and I think a combination
of the cool wet spring with some wind damage, and then going straight into a hot dry summer
didn’t help.
Perhaps there was also not enough fertility left over after the potato crop of the previous
season, and the same could be said for the carrots.
I had let the vines of the squash plants grow out into the onion crop for the last few weeks
before the onions were harvested.
I had figured that it didn’t matter much as the plants had essentially finished growing,
but the shade of the leaves may have contributed to the spoiling of a number of the onions,
due to the mould at their base.
This coming season the bed for the onions has been rotated to the other end of garden,
well away from the squash plants, and I just planted this season’s crop, into very loose soil.
In the crop rotation system that I've set up for this garden the carrots and onions
will once again follow on from where the potatoes grew last season.
But this time I decide to try to combine harvesting the potatoes with sieving the soil, in part
to able to harvest all of the potatoes, even the smallest tubers, which will greatly reduce
the risk of volunteer plants regrowing.
The sieving also eliminated any compaction of topsoil and got rid of any of the weeds.
It also removed stones from the top soil, producing cleaner soil that will especially
benefit the carrot crop.
In the half of the bed where carrots will grow, I took advantage of the trench where
the topsoil had been dug out for sieving, and worked to loosen the subsoil as well,
and dig out a lot of larger stones.
This was all a lot of work, but it was done at time when there was a lot less to do in
the gardens in general, and I only sifted the topsoil on 1/3 of the garden and then
loosened the subsoil on an area that was only about 15m2.
Of course this digging is quite invasive of the soil biology, but this soil won’t be
dug again for another three years, and I needed to dig out the potatoes anyways.
Although I'm still not sure if it is worth the effort, I’m thinking of doing the same
sieving at the end of this year's potato crop, and again next year.
Over three seasons I will have cleared out most of the stones from the topsoil for the
full garden, and this could be useful investment of time in the long run.
Even with the extra time spent digging and sifting the soil, the total amount of time
that I spent on this garden was significantly less than what I spent on the other gardens
of the same size, and yet it produced more food, this season at least.
Although it is not necessarily focused on reducing the amount of work as much as possible,
I designed this Simple Garden method to focused on growing only certain crops and to using
techniques that can really simplify things.
In addition to sifting some of the soil, I am also planning to change a few other things
in how I manage the garden this season.
I'm definitely going set up a better watering system, either sprinklers or possibly a drip
line irrigation system.
I’ll probably keep things the same with the crop squash, but I may plan for slightly
fewer plants.
I’m going to make sure that the soil is loosened before planting the potatoes, and
I think I’m going to try growing four different main crop potato varieties, to see if some
of the issues I've been having with this crop are due to the specific variety of potatoes
that I’ve been growing.
I recently tested the soil in the part of the garden that will grow carrots and onions
this year, and I added appropriate amendments to increase and balance the fertility, which
should help both of these crops, and improve the soil for subsequent seasons.
But i still plan to use this garden as a dumping ground for excess material that would otherwise
overwhelm my other composting systems, as it really seems to be able to handle this
mess of fertility in a really useful and simple way.