Now Tom has a question.
"In some cases, it is clearly better to place a barrier
and mulch heavily, moving the mulch and cutting the barrier
to plant what needs to get through.
Are there situations where planting before placing
the barrier and mulch would be more appropriate?"
Well, the one I can think of conveniently
for us right now is carrots.
Behind me, I have a main crop carrot garden
we're about to plant.
And we have five rows of carrots here.
And you can see we have sand, a layer of sand to plant
the carrot seeds in.
Now carrots have very fine seed.
They're one of the hardest things
to get a good germination on.
So what we'll do is here, we'll plant our carrot seed.
We'll place our carrot seed on these rows of sand.
And then we'll put a little bit of sand on top,
and then we'll press them down
to get moisture contact on the seed.
We might even put a small plank of wood on here,
or wood board on each row,
just to keep the moisture there in the sand,
because they take quite a few days to germinate.
Can be ten days, 12 days for carrots to germinate.
And in that time, often, the little tiny seed dries out
and breaks the germination cycle and doesn't germinate,
or heavy rains wash the seed out.
So we're better off planting carrots like this.
Now they don't like too much nitrogen, so we don't put
any extra compost on here.
We make sure that this is a bed that's
had a heavy feeding crop on it before, like corn.
So and that makes it, needs a lot of organic fertilizer.
So you want some of this drawn out,
the fertilizer, drawn out, particularly the nitrogen.
Otherwise the carrots will all grow with multiple roots
and it'll all be twisted and funny looking things.
So we want low nutrient quality of the soil,
we want nice sandy soil,
we got nice sandy soil, this is sandy soil.
We've loosened it right up,
so you can see, it can go right into this soil.
And then when they come up,
they're going to be,
usually there's going to be too many carrots
and we'll have to thin them out.
Because it's hard to do this much area in carrots.
So then we've got to thin them out,
and they're very fine little tiny seeds
and it really, you know,
it's very difficult to grow them through mulch.
So what we do is, we steer a hoe between,
between the sand here, between the sand rows
as the carrots come up,
and then we thin them out to one every,
we usually use the two finger spacing,
so we thin them to two fingers,
a little bit over a centimeter.
So two centimeters, something like that,
just less than an inch.
We thin them down one carrot, little carrot seed,
little for each, either side of your two fingers,
all the way along the row.
Then when we've done that,
we get them up to, say, two-three inches,
50 millimeters to 75 millimeters, something like that.
Then they're big enough to receive a mulch.
Then we come in
and we put the mulch in between the rows
and we start growing them with mulch.
So in this case,
we don't put any kind of barrier,
we don't put any kind of mulch down
until we've got the carrots germinated,
thinned out,
and large enough to receive the mulch.
Now that happens with some other vegetables as well,
so and a lot of things you can say
well, you look after it like a baby,
like a tiny little infant takes a lot of attention,
all day, all night.
And then later on it's just all day,
and then it's lesser with time,
less with time, and eventually ends up
not needing the same amount of attention.
So it's the same with a lot of your system,
that you need a lot of attention initially,
and then a little bit less attention over time,
actually when they get to be adolescents,
say, become a little bit unruly and ugly,
out of control,
it looks like, and then they become mature
and they come beautiful again.
They start off actually as infants that are really cute.
Everybody loves little infants and toddlers.
And then they become, you know,
children that are a little bit naughty,
and then they become adolescents
that are sort of out of control
and then at maturity, they can look beautiful and refined.
So a lot of our systems are like that.
Food forests are like that,
a lot of gardens are like that.
And it's the same in the micro-sense of
a strategic timing, things like carrot crops
out of the ground.
And it becomes kind of like a recipe
and each recipe fits into a menu
that you get very used to performing.
And so,
otherwise, you know, it's these fine seeds
with fine crops that you'll bring in through
from the initial starting point
where you might not have a barrier
and a mulch in position.
And carrots happen to be a classic,
because if you've ever tried growing carrots from seedlings
that you might purchase or you grow in a nursery,
in a seedling tray,
and then try transplanting them into the garden,
they very, very rarely turn into good carrots
or good, straight carrots.
But when you grow them straight out in the garden here
into this lovely soft, sandy soil,
you can get, you know, here you can get big carrots
that may be this long
and it's still beautiful and juicy and sweet.
But you have to learn the recipe
from, you know, and that becomes the menu
of your production.