I have been exploring a number of different methods for growing vegetables as part of
this RED Gardens Project, including comparing and contrasting a number of different approaches
for managing a family scaled garden.
While each approach has a different focus or philosophy, a uniting factor in all of
them is a focus on getting big yields and a wide diversity of crops out of each garden,
and to do this takes work, effort, skill and a fair amount of planning.
There are a lot of labour saving methods and techniques that can be used, but I have been
thinking for some time about how I would approach growing vegetables if my main focus was to
make things as simple as possible, and reduce the amount of work needed.
Last year I was able to expand my project, to add a seventh garden to the set of family
scale trials, and I decided to take this new garden to explore these possibilities.
I began to devise a method for managing this garden that focused on fewer crops, easier
fertility management, reduced weeding, less cultivation and minimising the amount of time
needed to care for crops.
So far, I think I have been quite successful with this, and I've called it the Simple Garden,
for lack of a better name.
Perhaps the easiest way to reduce the amount of work needed to manage a garden is to limit
the variety of crops grown in a season.
Of course this reduces the variety of vegetables that you get to eat, but it also greatly reduces
the work, planning, attention and mental effort of keeping track of the particular needs of each crop.
Eliminating crops that need to be harvested regularly, such as beans, courgettes or zucchini,
also reduces the workload, as harvesting can be one of the most time consuming tasks.
For this Simple Garden I thought I’d try growing only crops that can be harvested all
at once at the end of the season.
It would also be best if these were staple crops, ones that I naturally use a lot of,
and that are high yielding and easily stored.
So, I ended up selecting main crop potatoes, winter squash, onions, and main crop carrots.
I also decided to invest in permeable plastic fabric to cover the soil as soon as a crop
was harvested, and leaving it on until ready to plant the next crop in the following spring.
This would prevent soil erosion, and eliminate growth of weeds over winter, which means the
soil would be much cleaner and easier to prepare in the spring.
It also made sense to leave this ground cover in place where the squash would grow, which
would eliminate the need for weeding among the vines during the growing season.
It would also help to retain moisture, and the black plastic may help to speed up the
warming of the soil in the spring, by absorbing the heat of the sun and reducing the cooling
effect of the wind.
I also realised that if I was going to use this ground cover, then I could use it to
try out a variation of sheet composting.
I could simply lift back the ground cover, throw the pail of compost from my kitchen
on the soil, then cover it back up again.
This is probably the simplest version of composting, potentially eliminating the extra work that
is involved in building, covering, turning and spreading a traditional compost pile.
The decomposition takes place on the surface of the soil, as it generally does in nature,
and I suspect in many cases this is more beneficial to the soil biology and natural fertility
building processes.
The thin layer of material would eliminate any anaerobic conditions, as well as reducing
some of the other hassles that can come with compost piles, or at least hiding them from view.
But with the material spread out, any heat generated by the decomposition process would
not be able to build up enough to kill off any weed seeds and disease organisms.
This might be one of the problematic issues with this method, but at least the plastic
ground cover would make dealing with any weed seeds a lot easier.
Of course, not all crops will thrive with this method of composting, but the squash
plants will, and this sets up the starting point for a simple crop rotation.
So I divided the garden into 3 equal areas, with squash growing on one section, potatoes
on another, and with carrots and onions sharing a third section.
All of the garden will be covered over the winter, but I am only going to add compost
material to the 1/3 of garden that will grow squash the following season, which will concentrate
the fertility for this hungry and aggressive crop.
As each section is covered with two long sheets of plastic fabric, it is easiest to transplant
the squash plants down the centre between them, and they will easily spread out their
roots and vines to cover the entire area.
This makes it easier to continue to add additional composting material under the edge of the
plastic as the squash plants grow, at least until mid summer when the vines have taken
over the whole area.
But by then the onions will have been harvested, so from late summer and through autumn more
compost can be added to the part of the garden where the onions had been.
So it makes sense to have the squash follow the onions in rotation.
And once the carrots have been harvested from the other half of this section, compost can
be spread over the full area for the squash in the following season.
In the spring after the squash crop, the plastic is removed, and any remaining debris from
the compost is raked off and the section can be planted with potatoes.
While growing the potatoes the soil will end up being fully cultivated, with all of the
digging that is done for planting, earthing up and harvesting of the potato plants.
And after the potato harvest, seed beds for the carrots and onions can be prepared in
the warmth of the autumn and then covered, greatly reducing the amount of work that will
be needed in the spring.
So, the design that I've developed so far involves squash being grown over sheet composting
on 1/3 of the garden.
The next season this bed grows potatoes, and this is the only occasion that the soil is cultivated.
The potatoes are followed by carrots and onions the next season, and then back to squash to
complete the simple 3 year rotation.
Other rotations are possible of course, and I could including other crops, such as parsnip
and beetroot in with the carrots, or garlic in with the onions, without changing the method
too much.
If enough organic material is sheet composted before and during the growth of the squash
plants, then there should be enough fertility left in the soil for the potatoes and hopefully
for the carrots and onions a year later.
It may be useful to try to incorporate overwintering green manures, or to add another dedicated
soil building rotation on a 4th bed.
But this adds to the amount of work and effort needed, and I suspect that there will be more
than enough fertility available for this garden.
With this covered sheet composting method, I'm realising that it is a useful place to
put bulk quantities of organic materials, which could otherwise overwhelm a typical
compost pile.
This opens up the possibility of bringing in extra bulk material, essentially turning
one third of this garden into a giant composting system.
I started this garden from scratch last year, so I haven’t had much of a chance to test it yet.
I don’t yet know what the problems with this methods could be, or what the other benefits
or options will arise, but these will hopefully come out in the next few seasons as this garden
cycles through a few rotations.
But I've been impressed so far.
The sheet composting worked really well, with most of the material being incorporated into
the soil by the end of the season.
The squash did quite well and was easy to manage when grown over the black plastic,
and I got decent yields from the onions, carrots and potatoes.
In total there was over 500kg of storable crop from this 100m2 garden in its first season,
which is pretty good, and on par with the Intensive and Polycrop gardens.
But the time and effort that I put into this Simple Garden was significantly less than
in the other gardens, even with all the digging that I did to establish the beds in the spring.
Of course I want to live off of more than just these 4 crops, and they won’t last
the full year in storage.
But I guess this method assumes that you have another more active garden, in which all of
the greens, summer fruiting crops and the diversity of other vegetables can be grown.
This method perhaps best suits parts of the garden or an allotment that is farther away,
that you don’t need to visit so often, probably zone 3 of a permaculture design.
Or, if you get seasonal veg from a local market or CSA for only part of the season and wanted
to grow your own produce for the off season, then this method might work for you.
There are of course other limitations, including potential issues with all of the crops that
I have chosen, with blight, carrot fly, onion white rot or a late frost being able to wipe
out an entire crop.
So this gardening method may be less resilient to adverse weather conditions, or pests and
diseases, situations where greater diversity would be beneficial.
But it could be more resilient from the perspective of weed management and soil fertility, or
from the time and focus needed from the grower, which in my experience isn’t always dependable.
But I think the thing I like most about this Simple Garden is that I've been able to incorporate
crop rotation, weed management, composting, high yields and staple crops, and a lot less
work at busy times of the year.
And this is all worked into an integrated system, and a design that I quite like.
It probably doesn’t work for everyone, but I think there's a lot I can learn as I continue
to develop this Simple Gardening method over the coming years.
I have had a lot of fun working out the details of this Simple Garden, and I wonder what other
methods and variations I could explored as part of this RED Gardens Project.
But for now I really need to focus on developing what I have currently started, and to ensure
that this project has a viable future, which is going to take more financing than I currently have.
So, of you have liked this video, and you found it useful, and are interested in financially
supporting my work, please go to my Patreon page here or in the link below to find out
how to become a patron.
Any contribution helps, and the more I get, the more I can try out, and the more videos
I can make in the future.
But for now, thanks for watching.