In most of the vegetable gardens that I manage, I grow a wide variety of different crops,
and I plan it in such a way so that I can harvest a lot during the abundance of summer
and also have some vegetables available throughout the year.
This diversity of crops makes it more complicated to managing the gardens, as well as increasing
the amount of work that I have to put into the gardens over longer period of the season.
In addition lots of the crops that I grow require regular harvesting and attention,
especially during the summer and autumn. Three years ago when I had the chance to set
up a new garden, I wanted to try something different.
I saw this garden as a design challenge, an opportunity to combine the specific choices
of vegetables, with different methods of crop rotation, fertility management, soil cultivation
and weed management into a fairly simple and integrated method, which would produce a lot
of food, with a lot less work and attention needed.
It's interesting to look back over the past three seasons, and to examine how well this
Simple Garden has lived up to my expectations as a useful gardening method, in the right context.
In each of the last three years I have been able to harvest an average of about 500 kg
of vegetables out of this 100m2 garden. This is the highest yielding of all of my outside
vegetable gardens, slightly above the Intensive Garden.
This average yield would have been a bit higher if the harvest from 2018 hadn’t been reduced
by the dry conditions that we had that season, but all the gardens were affected by this.
But looking at the yields of the individual crops, none of them did significantly better
than the same crops in the other gardens. The squash plants generally do well in this
garden, but this hasn’t translated into much better yields, and the yield of the carrots
has been broadly within the range of what I've harvested from the other gardens.
This larger crop of such a high yielding vegetable does boost the overall harvest from this garden,
but that has been partially offset by the equally large bed of lower yielding onions
over the past few years. Even the potato yield is comparable to the
other gardens. I would have expected significantly higher yields from this main crop potatoes
that I grow in the Simple Garden, compared to what I harvest from the early variety of
potatoes that I grow in the other gardens. But a poor choice in varieties and a few other
factors has reduced this yield, but it still is a respectable harvest.
The yield for each of the individual crops hasn’t been remarkable, when compared to
the other gardens, so that doesn’t account for the higher overall yield of this Simple Garden.
It seems that this higher yields had much more to do with the limited range of vegetables
that I grow in this garden. Having large beds of single crops that don’t
need regular tending, has reduced the amount of garden that taken up with unproductive
paths, and this would help increase the overall yield.
Avoiding some of the lower yielding crops such as peas or beans helps to keep the yield
high, but the slow and steady pace of these long season crops that I’ve selected is
also a factor. Or more accurately, over the last few years
I've not been so successful in keeping up with the planting of a succession of faster
growing vegetables in the other gardens. Part of the higher yield in this Simple Garden
was simply due to the fact that more of the ground was covered with plants for more of
the season. Put another way, there is the possibility
of significantly increasing the yields from the other gardens, if I can put in the extra
work to keep up with the plantings, as well as improving the methods, and my skills.
But with the Simple Garden it's more about refining the methods in order to improve the
yields, not necessarily adding more work.
This is a relatively new garden, compared to the others, and it can take time for the
soil fertility and organic matter to build up adequately.
In the first season there was the possibility of increased yield, by taking advantage of
the existing fertility in the fallow ground, which is often the case with new gardens.
Since then, the sheet composting method that I've been using as the main way of adding
fertility to this garden seems to be working well for the squash crop.
I started using this method of composting on the surface of the soil, by adding a pail
of compost material from the house every few days, and then covering it with ground cover
material. I’ve also added huge amounts of waste apples,
and even dug out and added an existing compost pile that had only partially decomposed.
It is a hassle to have to remove the ground cover fabric every time I added a bucket of
material, but this saved me from having to build a separate compost pile and then to
move the material again.
I was concerned that the squash might have used up most of this fertility, and there
would not be enough leftover minerals in the soil for the potato crop the following season,
so I have been adding chicken manure pellets to top up the fertility.
This is a fairly easy task, and not so inexpensive, but I do wonder how necessary it is, or how
well the garden would produce without this fertility top up.
Last year I also did a detailed soil test of the third of the garden after the potato
crop was harvested. The results showed a significant deficiency
of sulphur, sodium and boron in the soil, and that it could use more phosphorous and
potassium. I added amendments to increase the concentration
of these minerals in the soil, before sowing the carrots and onions, though I'm not sure
what effect it had as I didn’t leave part of the garden unamended as a control.
This season I plan to test the soil before the potato crop, as correcting any fertility
imbalances there might be after a season of sheet composting, seems to be a better approach.
Hopefully this will correct the mineral deficiencies that were apparent in the leaves of some of
the potato plants last year, and still benefit the carrots and onions the following season.
It will be interesting to see how the levels of soil fertility and organic matter evolve
over the next coming years with this rotation of sheet composting followed by remineralisation
of one third of the garden each season.
In order to start this garden three years ago, I put in a fair amount of work in order
to prepare the soil, including digging and clearing two thirds of the garden for the
potatoes, carrots and onions. Since then the plan has been to only cultivate
the soil during the potato rotation, first to prepare the beds for planting the potatoes,
then to thoroughly dig it at the end of the season to harvest the potatoes.
The resulting loose soil is then levelled into a fine seedbed for the carrots and onions
and covered until the spring. This leaves the two thirds of the garden uncultivated
each season, which significantly reduces the workload, as well as reducing the amount of
soil disturbance. For the past two seasons I have decided to
sieve the soil in the full bed when harvesting the potatoes, which helps me to avoid leaving
any potatoes in the soil, and removes all of the stones and weeds at the same time,
as well as allowing me to loosen the subsoil underneath while I'm at it.
This is definitely a labour intensive process that is not really necessary, but I do feel
that it helps with the carrot crop, and it makes hoeing and weeding the garden a lot
easier as there are fewer stones on the surface.
This sieving of the soil added about 10 hours of work each season, on top of what would
be necessary for just harvesting the potatoes. This is more than 25% of the work load for
this garden, bringing the total to almost 40 hours in a season.
Even with this big task, this garden takes a lot less work than any of the other gardens,
especially when comparing the total amount of food harvested to the total amount or time
spent each year. Averaged over the last three seasons, this
Simple Garden produced about 500kg of food from about 35 hours of work a year, which
translates to 14 kilograms harvested for every hour that I worked over the season.
That is a lot of food, and significantly above what I’m able to harvest from the other
gardens, which range from about 5 to 8 kilograms per hour.
This will only improve when I don’t have the extra work of preparing the ground and
sieving soil, and could perhaps even get above 20 kilograms per hour.
This is the main benefit of this gardening method, producing a lot more food for a lot
less effort, but at the cost of significantly reducing the variety of vegetables that I’m
able to grow.
It is interesting to look at the proportion of time that I spend on the other tasks for
this garden, and when they need to be done. Sowing the crops takes the least amount of
time, and watering takes very little time now that I have a much better watering system.
Adding compost and fertility amendments takes roughly 3 hours over the year, and the same
amount of time is spent weeding and on general maintenance and management of the garden.
Caring for the crops took a total of almost 7 hours last year, which included protecting
the young squash plants from the cold winds, thinning the carrots, and protection them
from the carrot root fly, as well as earthing up the potato plants.
Most of these tasks need to be done from May through to the middle of July, which is about
the same time that most of the watering, weeding and sowing needs to be done.
So this is a busy period of time in the garden, with most of this work being relatively time
sensitive, and the success of the garden depending on doing this work when it needs to be done.
Of course this is the same with all of gardens, except that this time sensitive work is spread
over much more of the season. Harvesting onions is the only real task later
in summer, and then harvesting the squash in the autumn.
The larger tasks of harvesting the carrots and the potatoes is less time sensitive, and
this coincides with the extra work of sieving and preparing the soil.
With my soil type and the climate that I’m growing in, this work can be done from late
autumn and throughout the winter, so long as the soil isn’t too wet.
The task of adding material for sheet composting is perhaps the most flexible, and can be done
at any time after the carrots and onions are harvested, up until the squash plants have
started to fill out the bed.
Overall this Simple Garden method has surpassed my expectations. It's produced a lot of food,
and with better management, varieties and skills, as well as good weather conditions,
the total harvested could be quite a bit bigger. I really like the the sheet composting method,
as a flexible way to add fertility to the garden, and it will be interesting to see
how the soil evolves in coming years, especially with the soil testing and remineralisation.
All of this will hopefully lead to healthier and more resilient plants that will produce
even higher yields. Of course, the limiting factor of all of this
is that I only get 4 crops to eat out of this garden, but they do provide the staple of
vegetables from the autumn right through to the following spring, if everything stores
well. I could diversify things a bit without changing
the method too much, including adding a beetroot and parsnip in with the carrots, garlic in
with the onions, and even adding a row of early potatoes.
Of course this approach to managing a garden is not for everyone, but it could work really
well in some contexts, including for people who aren’t around to be able to manage and
harvest the abundant fruiting crops in the summer and the autumn.
For me, I'd rather grow a greater diversity of crops in a different kind go garden much
closer to my house, and then to use something similar to the Simple Garden approach to grow
all of the storage crops in a plot further away, that I need to visit less often.
Overall I think this has been quite a successful experiment int developing a different way
to managing a garden, and I've learned a lot in the process.
It will be interesting to see how this garden evolves over the next three years.