I'm Dennis Worwood, USU Extension in Emery County,
and today we're talking about wide row gardening,
and also a system of gardening that keeps the ground covered and useful.
I view the garden space and kind of a giant solar collector,
and my purpose is to convert sunlight into food,
and to do that, I need to keep the ground covered so that my solar collector is busy.
Another advantage of doing that is that
weeds have less of a chance to pop through.
In any irrigated or rainy situation, that I know of,
if you have bare soil, it's an invitation for something to grow
and so, I like to keep things growing.
So, my intention in planting this garden is
to cover every square inch with something that's green and useful to me.
So, here in front of me we have a planting of
cabbage, and cauliflower, and broccoli
that was made about two weeks ago—they were transplanted in.
Prior to these plants being here
this area was the garlic patch, and once the garlic was big enough to be harvested,
in early July, then we worked the soil up
and planted these cold crops here
that we intend to harvest probably in late September.
I've done the same thing with peas here in central Utah,
planted peas in April, harvested in June and July
tilled the peas under, planted again immediately,
and harvested peas again in September and early October.
I've done the same thing as well with beets, with carrots, and with some of the other
cool season crops like lettuce and spinach.
I've found that even in our relatively short growing season,
that we can actually mature two crops.
So, in this system, what I want to do is plant things
(so that, uh) with the idea that I'm going to keep the weeds suppressed
while the plants are small, but once the plants are large enough
I want them to be completely covering the surface of the ground
and then I have less trouble with weeds.
So, in the background you can see that there's some onions.
They're not a terribly competitive crop,
but they're planted in a way that pretty much utilizes all of the space there.
We have a row of squash and pumpkins.
Again, they're getting a little bit unruly this time of year,
but I want to have the ground completely covered.
The next row over, we have some of the traditional cool season crops:
the carrots, beets, onions, swiss chard, kale, broccoli.
Down on the far end, there's some soy beans.
Again, they were planted with the rows fairly close
for example, the beets, those beet rows go across the width of the bed
and were probably six inches apart.
Once the beat plants got up, they were able to cover the ground completely.
And the next row over is potatoes that are getting ready to harvest,
and again, there's three rows there
planted in a way that they pretty much cover the ground. And so
in my planning, I want to try to cover the ground as much as I can with useful vegetation,
and even on bare ground, once I've weeded an area
you notice the mulch that's among these cabbage and broccoli plants
I'll typically cover it with some kind of mulch, like straw, or
in this case grass clippings.
to try to conserve moisture and keep the weeds down.
But, think about that in your garden.
You can rotate crops, and even if, say in a place like the onions
where that's going to be harvested a little later, probably not giving me enough time
to plant another vegetable crop,
what will happen here, is I will harvest these onions
probably within the next three weeks
and then I will plant a cover crop like buckwheat,
or fall grain, or canola, or something like that,
get as much growth out of it as I can,
and then till it under to help improve the soil.
So, think about keeping your garden plot busy
think about keeping it covered with useful vegetation.