The Modern Victory Garden

Originally posted (May 30, 2010) with only Parts 1 & 2 due to connection problems to You Tube.  Problem resolved itself and this blog post was updated (May 31, 2010) to include Parts 3, 4, & 5.  

Spring Garden Tour Part 1                                   

Spring Garden Tour Part 2 

 

Spring Garden Tour Part 3                                       

Spring Garden Tour Part 4                           

Spring Garden Tour part 5 (Final)                        

I got started late yesterday afternoon and wrapped up this morning with prepping the beds in the newest section of the garden.   All the beds not planted up already were loosened and aerated using the broad fork and then lightly cultivated and raked.   Two of the beds are destined to be the 2010 tomato patch and cucumber bed.   I wanted to get these covered with red plastic mulch so that the soil would have a chance to really warm up before I plant them up mid April.   

You might have noticed in the second photo that my cat Sid was performing his usual and customary role of supervising the work being done in the garden!   He is a cherished companion and is always close at hand when I am outside working in the garden.                                               

Lots of things are emerging from the earliest of the spring plantings.   The spinach patch was planted using my planting jig for the first time.   The plants are getting their first true leaves and are getting easier to see in photos now.                    

The planting jig worked beautifully.   The plants are well spaced and there is only a few gaps where some seeds did not germinate.   I also used the planting jig to direct seed the pea patch as well.   The peas are now emerging and look like they too are going to be nicely spaced in the bed.   I think I can safely say that the planting jig design is performing well.         

The Cascadia sugar snap peas I transplanted out a week ago are thriving.   They seemed to particularly enjoy the bright sunshine we had today.

Sid was enjoying the sun too.   He was sticking close to me in the garden but taking every opportunity to soak up sun himself.                    

The swiss chard I transplanted earlier in the week all seem to be doing quite well too.                                            

Not much work to be done in the garden at the moment because I have now completed all of the spring bed prep and the planting out process will be spread out over the course of many weeks.   It’s a great time to just stroll through the garden and enjoy the new growth and take in the start of the spring bloom cycle.   Our property has quite a few really beautiful specimen sized rhododendron trees and azalea bushes.   Most of them bloom in April and May but we have a few early ones too.   Here’s the first azalea bush to bloom for 2010.                         

The first rhodie to bloom each year is really a beauty - tucked into the edge of my vegetable garden area but largely hidden by other trees and bushes.   

Sid convinced me that the rest of the afternoon should be spent sitting on the deck soaking up sunshine and admiring the blooming rhodie at the gardens edge.   Wise cat!                                 

Just one day before the official first day of spring and we got up to 65 degrees for most of the afternoon!   There was no way I was going to do much of anything else but putter in the garden on such a brilliant and sunny day!   My cat Sid joined me for most of the time and the first order of business was to move his potted catnip out of the greenhouse to the front entry area of the house.   He loves this plant!       

There is a lot of debris in the yard and deck because we had a high wind event last week.   Several large trees come down across our road as a result and the yard, gardens, deck, and driveway are just littered with branches, needles, and leaves.   Going to have to devote some time to sweeping up and clearing away the debris. 

You may recall that the seed potatoes arrived almost exactly a month ago and I put them out next to a window in the shop to encourage the formation of sprouts.   I am planning to plant the potato patch some time in the coming week and they are just perfectly sprouted for that.             

I need to cut about 35 of them in half to have enough seed pieces.   I will probably do that tomorrow because I want the cut portions to have at least 24 hours to dry out before I put these into the damp cool soil.   In preparation for the upcoming potato bed planting, I cleaned out the last of the overwintered parsnips and carrots from that bed.   They both were going to seed and needed to just be composted.   I then applied rock minerals to the bed (rock phosphate and greensand).   I had done all the other beds earlier this spring but did not do this last one because it had crops growing in it.   I also broadcasted some bone meal and organic all purpose fertilizer over the surface of the bed and then layered on some compost.   This bed is now ready for me to tackle the potato planting process.  

The other outdoor project I did today was to aerate the long vertical grow bed, cultivate it, and then rake it smooth.   I then planted up two thirds of the bed, putting Cascadia sugar snap peas under the trellis supports and Mokum carrots in the front portion of the bed.   I used my 2-inch planting jig for the carrot planting and that went very well.   I had started some Cascadia peas a few weeks ago indoors.   The soil mix was not wicking water very well and so the germination rate was not as good as it should have been.   But I still ended up with a good amount of pre-sprouted peas. 

These went into the bed first and then I just direct seeded the rest of the way along the bed.            

The final step is to cover the bed with some wire panels to discourage birds from pecking at the young pea sprouts.

The greenhouse plants are all just taking off and really growing beautifully.   Here’s a view into it looking down from our side deck.  

The pac choi growing in containers in the greenhouse are quickly putting on some size and it should not be long before we can start enjoying some of them.

Over the past week I have been steadily working on re potting the tomato starts.   I did another 15 of them today.   There are 32 more to go and I hope to have them done before too much longer.   More and more of them are shifting out to the greenhouse (out from the lights in the shop) and are now residing in the greenhouse during the day and are then moved into the shop at night to protect them from too much cold at night.                             

The super early Siletz plants are getting really good sized and are hale and hearty.      

They are now four weeks into their current pots and were ready for another re potting to even larger containers.   This was the last task I tackled for the day.   I put them out on the front porch to enjoy a little late afternoon sun while they finished draining off the drink of water I had just given them.   

They are spending their days in the greenhouse and their nights inside the house.   The next time I re pot these it will be in about four more weeks - when they will go into the large black containers that they will grow in for the rest of the season.          

I am glad I spent so much time outside today.   The forecast is for the weather to get cooler and showery for the next several days, so grabbing as much time in the sun while I can was my focus for today.    Spring is definitely here - and I must say it makes me happy!

What a gorgeous day we had today!   It got up to the mid 50’s and everything is breaking dormancy fast.    I had to run some errands this morning, so I did not get out into it until after lunchtime - but the few hours I was outside this afternoon was heavenly.

Because we had late blight hit the garden last year, I did not save any of my potatoes for seed stock and chose instead to buy all new certified seed stock this year.   I ordered my potatoes from Ronniger Potato Farm LLC because they had a good selection, good reputation, and the best prices.   Friday my big box of potatoes arrived; 10 lbs of Yukon Gold; 10 lbs of Caribe; and 25 pounds of Russet Burbank.   

The front bag is the Yukon Gold and the back bag is the Caribe and underneath the two bags you can just glimpse the Russet Burbanks.   I opened the box and checked them today, but tomorrow when I have a little more time I will lay them out to begin chitting and do a count to see if I will need to cut them into smaller pieces.   I am going to use the 4-foot by 32-foot bed for the potatoes this year and will be planting them using the John Jeavon’s method of planting potatoes (done at the same time you double dig a bed) spacing them using a within row spacing of 9 inches and approximately 9 inches deep into the soil.   For a 32-foot long bed, I should end up with 42 rows at 9-inch intervals and 5 seed potato pieces per row if spaced 9 inches apart.   So my calculations come up that I need 210 to 215 potato seed pieces to do this bed in that manner.   These look like really nice seed potatoes and I am anxious to get them set out to begin forming sprouts.

The main task I worked on today was prepping the big 4-foot by 40-foot bed for the beginning of the planting season.   Specifically, I used the U-Bar to aerate the entire bed and then did a light cultivation and raking.   At the end of the bed, I also worked in some general-purpose organic fertilizer into a 4-foot by 12-foot section of the bed. This area will be the 2010 pea patch and I am planning to plant them tomorrow since the soil temperature is more than warm enough.   Here’s the bed after I finished the prep work.   The closest end in the photo below is where the pea patch will be going.   

Today I also took down the grow tunnel cover from the overwintered bed of carrots and parsnips.  You can see it in the photo above.    I intend to finish harvesting what remains of these in the next several weeks to clear out the bed for the coming potato crop that will go in that bed.   I need to similarly use up the last few January King cabbages from this bed to also get them out of the way for the potatoes.    

Other tasks I got to today included taking the U-Bar and gently aerating and fertilizing the raspberry patch – adding a layer of compost on the surface after I was completed.   I also rotated the six packs of seedlings in the trays under the grow lights to ensure that plants on the ends get a chance to be in the middle for a while - where they enjoy a more complete exposure to the grow lights.   I took the opportunity while swapping the packs around to brush the small seedlings lightly with my hands to help them “sturdy up”.                        

In the greenhouse, the kale and Chinese cabbages I planted out last weekend are doing well and the slow growing mache is starting to get a move on and produce more vegetation.   About the time the carrots and parsnips are finished up, these greens should be ready to start harvesting lightly.                          

That is it for today.   Tomorrow I am going to plant the pea patch and put up my horizontal grow support structure.    Forecast is for another gloriously beautiful day so it will be good to have an excuse to be out in it!

Last spring we put in a new raspberry patch as part of the big garden expansion project.   Ten bare root Heritage raspberries were planted in mid March 2009.   We were right in the midst of clearing the expansion site area and constructing new garden beds, so the planting up process was kept to a bare minimum.   In fact, we did not even put a support structure in place for the raspberries and opted to use some tomato cages and ladders to support the raspberry canes for the first year instead.   The plan was to come back in the fall or following spring and finish up with the support structures.   Here’s what they looked like last year when we first planted them up.         

And here is what they look like now, just a little less than one year later. The area needs weeding and the canes need a little pruning.                          

We had fifty percent survival rate on the bare root nursery stock in that five have grown out and five never even broke dormancy.    Not very happy with that outcome so this spring when I ordered the five replacement Heritage bare root plants – I went to another source for my nursery stock.   Hopefully the next five will have a better success rate.                               

In addition to replacing the failed plantings and constructing a support structure, there was another problem that revealed itself this past year that also needed correcting.    Specifically, the area the bed is planted on is quite sloped and even with drip irrigation it was difficult to keep the plants properly watered because the run off was so severe down the slope.   Knowing the replacement bare root plants will be arriving within the next few weeks, I decided to get going on the first phase of rejuvenating this raspberry patch.   The focus today was on creating a terraced bed for both rows to correct the slope problem, weeding and grubbing out the beds, and pruning the prior year canes back to the growing points.

I have a stack of timbers behind the shop left over from last year’s garden expansion project.   I had been toying with the idea of using them to make beds in the green house but have sinced talked myself out of that idea so these were available to be used for the raspberry patch rejuvenation project. 

The temporary supports and drip irrigation line were removed.   I then dug out the lower edge of the bed, laid out the timbers and anchored them into the soil using stakes and tamped down dirt.   The bed area was then weeded and cultivated and raked level.   The last step was to do a quick pruning - taking off dead sections but leaving the one-year-old wood that had growth so that it will produce a summer harvest for us.     Here’s how the patch looked when I wrapped up for the afternoon.                            

Phase 2 of the raspberry bed rejuvenation project will have to wait until after the replacement plants arrive.   When they get here, I will plant them out and then fertilize the entire bed, reinstall the drip irrigation line, and put down a thick layer of compost over the beds.   The final task will be to then construct the supports for both rows.   Got the hardest part of the project completed today and I think they will do much better with this simple fix. 

Yesterday I planted up a 4-foot by 12-foot section of garden bed in spinach using one of my new planting jigs.   I took pictures as I went but am going to wait to post about it until I am sure it worked as expected – which will be confirmed when the new plants begin emerging.   Hopefully within the next several weeks I will have a complete report for you on this.                    

Do you have any garden “fixes” you are attending to this year?

For the past few nights it has really been noticeably lighter out when I leave work to head home.   Similarly in the morning it has been lighter out earlier.   I even heard a songbird calling this morning as I was heading out the door.   When the birds start migrating back and getting all "twitterpated" - you know spring is just around the corner!                    

 I did a quick nighttime garden inspection this evening after dinner.   Not ideal for taking pictures (flash pictures on my camera tend to look washed out) so I don't have photos to share tonight, but I must tell you that the garlic (both elephant and regular) and onions have really taken off this week.   Unlike other parts of the country, we have been enjoying a particularly mild January and early February this year.   Nighttime temps in the 40's and the daytime temps have been in the low 50's.   The combination of really mild weather we have been experiencing and a break (at last) in the constant overcast rainy weather has apparently worked some magic on the allium bed crops.   The onions in the containers in the green house put on some serious growth this week too.   The mache in the greenhouse is also progressing - but it is a pokey grower and the new growth is not nearly as impressive as the onions and garlic.   What I could not judge well in the darkness, was whether the overwintered spinach in the grow tunnel cover was doing anything significant.   I will have to wait until tomorrow morning to check it out.   

I have some onion sets that I ordered that have not been delivered yet.   I sure wish I had them this weekend, because the conditions are ideal for getting them into the ground.   It was mostly dry today and is supposed to stay that way on through the weekend.   This bodes well for me to finally get that big bed of crimson clover cover crop turned over this weekend.   I also plan to start some Merlot lettuce on Saturday.   These are seeds I received from Dan at the Urban Veggie Garden Blog.   I am really looking forward to growing them this year.    

If I had my way I would spend all day for both days of the weekend puttering outside in the garden.   I am in real need of some fresh air, exercise, and sunshine.   Unfortunately, I do have some errands to take care of on Saturday, but luckily they are not so much as to take up the entire day.   

For the many readers of my blog who are in locations currently gripped by the icy hand of winter, please stay safe and warm and remember that it will not be all that much longer before you too will be enjoying the sound of returning songbirds and green shoots sprouting in the garden!

It was drizzling rain this morning, so I spent several hours in the shop making progress on the planting jig construction project.    Last week, I completed the 2-inch planting jig, which was the prototype of the design.   Today, I completed most of the assembly of the 3-inch, 4-inch, and 6-inch planting jigs.   They need to sit over night now to let the glue dry and set before I can complete them by attaching the handles on the back.   I did change one thing with these 3 planting jigs from the first one I constructed.   I went up to a 5/16th inch dowel pin, which is a little bigger and should make a larger hole impression in the soil.   I used a 5/16th drill bit to widen the holes in the pegboard where the dowel pins would fit.   That worked very well.   Easy to drill and the pegs fit in quite snugly.   Here’s the 6-inch planting jig - fully assembled with the exception of the handle attachment.  

By the time I wrapped up with the project work in the shop, the rain had stopped and the sun was making a partial appearance.   Took advantage of the break in the weather and got a start on some early spring bed prep work.   There are several beds with a green manure crop of crimson clover growing in them that need to be turned over in the next few weeks, in order that the plant material can sufficiently decompose prior to planting up the beds.   I like to get this done at least six weeks before I expect to be planting up a bed.   Most of the early crops are scheduled to be planted in mid March, so the green manure crop needs to be turned over by the end of January.   It’s not that hard to turn over crimson clover, but I have enough area planted up in it that I try to break it up over a period of several sessions to avoid over doing and hurting my back in the process.   I have one big 40 foot long by 4 foot wide bed that will need to be turned over.  

And I have a 12 foot by 4 foot wide bed that needs to be turned over as well.   The back most portion of the bed has compost on it instead of the green manure crop, because it had cabbages growing in it until very late in the fall and missed being planted with crimson clover as a result.   I decided this bed was the better one to get started with today.       

I use a garden fork and just turn a fork full of the clover and soil over on itself – such that the roots and soil are facing up and the vegetation is turned down into the dirt.   I work my way down one side of the bed.      

And then I work down the other side until it is completed.                      

In about two weeks, I will need to come back to this bed and use a hoe on it to cultivate the top few inches and chop up the few clover plants that will manage to get roothold and attempt to grow again.   Using a green manure crop reduces the amount of compost I have to use each year to add organic matter to the soil.   Given the number and size of beds that I have in the garden, if I were to use strictly compost I would have to have a huge compost making operation to keep up with it.   By using a combination of compost and green manure crops, I keep my garden sufficiently replenished with organic matter without having a monumental sized compost system set up. 

While I was out in the garden, I also did bed prep on the adjacent bed to the one I just turned the cover crop over in.   I added a thin layer of finished compost and then emptied out old potting soil from containers into the bed and raked it smooth.                                                           

I use potting soil in containers for at least two years, rejuvenating it with the addition of compost and organic fertilizers.   However, after several years of use, I recycle it into the garden beds and replace the container soil with a fresh mix.   I had several containers that had old soil mix in them that I have been holding through the winter with the intention of adding to the garden beds this spring.   Both the 12 foot by 4 foot beds are now initially prepped for spring.     

Before they are planted up, I will use the broad fork to aerate them and will also broadcast a general-purpose organic fertilizer over the beds.   For now though, they are basically prepped for the season.   I have lots more to go over the course of the next several weeks.   First priority will be to turn over that large 40-foot bed of crimson clover.   I will need to break that up into several work sessions.   If it does not rain tomorrow, I will try and get one part completed then.               

Have a dinner engagement to attend this evening; so no harvesting was done today.   Well, I should say that I did not “intentionally” harvest anything today.   During the course of turning over the crimson clover, I unearthed over 3 lbs of Butte potatoes!   This was one of the potato patch beds last year and (as usual) I managed to miss quite a few spuds when I harvested them last fall.   They overwintered in the soil nicely and are really good looking potatoes.   Probably have them for dinner tomorrow night.

I hope you are having a good weekend and managing to get some time in on some garden related projects.

There are many of us who have limited space availability for food production gardening and yet still manage to produce a tremendous amount of our own food supply.   This post is part of a blog series devoted to exploring the many techniques available to optimize food production gardening.   There are quite a few topics that relate to this pursuit - including (among others):

• Crop Selection
• Intensive Planting Practices
• Season Extension
• Soil Management & Fertility

The blog series was kicked off by focusing on Crop Selection.   Now we are exploring Intensive Planting Practices.   Intensive planting techniques generally include a combination of planting in raised beds (either double dug or otherwise greatly amended and improved), closely spaced planting, intercropping and succession planting, and the use of vertical growing techniques – all for the purpose of producing the same amount of food in approximately 20% of the space used by traditional row gardening practices.   Last week we focused in on the topic of Raised Beds.   This week we will keep moving through the intensive planting techniques by spending some time discussing closely spaced planting practices.   

Closely Spaced Planting –                   

Taking full advantage of the greater planting area provided by a raised wide bed is the next critical technique of intensive planting.   The idea of closely spaced planting is to take the one-dimensional row planting process and make it two-dimensional by planting the raised bed using within-row spacing in all directions.   This greatly increases the quantity of a crop that can be produced in a given planting area. The plants are spaced such that when mature, their leaves should just barely touch.   This close spacing provides an additional benefit (besides efficient space utilization) in that it provides a mini-climate and living mulch that reduces weed growth and helps hold moisture in the soil.                                  

For those who use the square foot gardening techniques of planting in grids this should not be a new concept.     The square foot method recommends using a grid of squares dividing every square foot into a number of sub-squares appropriate to the spacing of the crop being grown.    Similarly, the Grow Biointensive method employs a hexagonal pattern using various hexagonal and triangular shaped planting jigs with the spacing dictated by what is appropriate for the specific crop.     Wide row gardening uses a scattered broadcasting of seeds that is later thinned using a common garden rake (if needed).   Another variation I have seen is to just plant a traditional row across the width of the bed using the optimal spacing between each seed, then mark the distance from that row to the next row that gives the optimal plant distance and then plant another row and keep doing this until the bed area is planted up.   This year, I have seen one more method that achieves this result – Annies Granny has created her own tissue paper seed mats which do a great job of ensuring optimal spacing.            

I personally most often use a combination of the square foot grid system and wide row block planting.   I have also used the multiple rows method a time or two but it is not my usual method.   My bed widths and lengths are all in increments of 4 feet - so it makes it very easy to employ the square foot method of using a grid of squares and sub- squares.   I use block planting for large beds of spinach, carrots, garden peas, and bush beans.    In this next picture, you can see some of both methods.   The broccoli (with the copper collars) in the foreground is planted in 1 foot square grids.   Behind it is a block planting of spinach.                                       

This is one area of my gardening that I can stand to most improve upon and as such, it represents my best opportunity to further increase my yields.   Specifically, I am guilty of doing two things:

1. When I use broadcast block seeding for spinach and carrots I tend to not do the required rake thinning or I am not aggressive enough with it when I do.   The consequence is that I often end up with areas in the bed that are too closely spaced, which causes plants to be small and not reach their potential. 
2. My trenching method for planting potatoes produces a reliable crop of potatoes each year but it leaves a wide section between each trench that is essentially unused.   I should be getting much more production out of each 100 square feet of growing bed than I currently am.   For example, in 2009 I had 208 square feet of bed area planted in potatoes and I got a yield of 120 pounds (would have been about 140 but I lost some to late blight).   This works out to approximately 70 pounds per 100 square feet of growing bed.   An average expected production for potatoes per 100 square feet of intensively planted growing bed should be 200 lbs!   Obviously, I can do better than I am on this crop.

My plan to address these issues is to continue using broadcast seeding for beans and peas because the size of the seed makes it very easy to do a good job of spacing with them and I have had no issues with those two crops.   For the spinach and carrots, I may give Annies Granny’s tissue paper seed mats a try or go the route of the multiple rows method.   I am not a fan of the square foot grid method for large plantings of these closely spaced crops because it is just too time consuming to do a large area in this manner.   As for the potatoes, I am going to give a deep grid planting a try.   John Jeavon’s recommends just planting potatoes as you double dig, placing the seed potatoes on the top of the lower trench of loosened and amended soil and then covering them with the soil from the next trench’s upper level as you work your way down the bed. He recommends spacing 9 inches and then offsetting the next trench to create the Biointensive hexagonal grid pattern.   I think it would be simpler to use a 12-inch spacing and just do a typical square foot gardening squared grid.   I am not sure if I will do a full double dig on the potato beds, but at a minimum I will do a full u-bar aeration and then plant them deeply on the grid spacing.    I will likely need to add a heavy mulch layer to get full production out of the bed since I will not be backfilling a trench.   I will have to think about what to use for that layering because when I have used straw for that in the past, I ended up with an explosion in the slug population.                       

Do you use closely spaced planting techniques? 

There are many of us who have limited space availability for food production gardening and yet still manage to produce a tremendous amount of our own food supply.   Over the course of several weeks, I plan to devote some of my blogging time to exploring the many techniques available to optimize food production gardening.   There are quite a few topics that relate to this pursuit - including (among others):

• Crop Selection
• Intensive Planting Practices
• Season Extension
• Soil Management & Fertility

Last week I kicked this blog series off by focusing on Crop Selection.   This week the focus will be on Intensive Planting Practices.   This is a very important topic with several subtopics that are worth discussing at some length.   In order to devote proper attention to these areas (while also sparing your poor eyes the task of reading page after page of blog text!) I am breaking this particular topic into several parts.                               

Intensive planting techniques generally include a combination of planting in raised beds (either double dug or otherwise greatly amended and improved), closely spaced planting, intercropping and succession planting, and the use of vertical growing techniques – all for the purpose of producing the same amount of food in approximately 20% of the space used by traditional row gardening practices.   You may be familiar with Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening, John Jeavon’s Grow Biointensive method, or Dick Raymond’s Wide Row Gardening.   All of these authors and their recommended practices are using intensive planting techniques in various shapes and forms.   My own gardening style and intensive planting practices have evolved by incorporating and combining elements from of all of these sources, as well as from many others.                              

Planting In Raised Beds – Traditional row gardening has plantings in a relatively narrow row - generally spanning several inches in width and with wide strips of walkways in between.   This allows for the easy use of power equipment (rototillers etc) to do weed management and cultivation.   The proportion of growing areas to walkways in a traditional row garden is therefore significantly lower than a garden that utilizes raised garden beds, which generally are 4 feet in width with wide strips of walkways in between. More growing bed area and less walkways translates into greater production per square foot of available garden area.   Wide row gardening also takes advantage of this technique by increasing the width of rows significantly (often 12 to 18 inches wide) but wide rows are still only 1/4th the width of a typical raised garden bed.                 

Raised beds can be created without using any edging materials by simply mounding and shaping the prepared soil into the bed shape.   I prefer to use a boxed edged bed to prevent edge erosion and I also find it discourages accidental walking from occuring in the prepared soil.   Another advantage of a raised boxed edged bed is that it allows me to use a weed whacker to keep the walkways trim and tidy without harming the plants which are safe within the protective edging of the bed.   Finally, boxed edged beds also provide a place to anchor PVC hoops and other structures that are useful for season extension and vertical growing (future topics!).   For all these reasons (plus I think they look nice!), I use edging on all of my garden beds.    

In addition to increasing the amount of planting area per square foot of garden area, raised beds also improve production in that they are generally prepared by either double digging the soil or otherwise deeply cultivating the area and amending the soil.   Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Garden method actually calls for the creation of a soil mix that is utilized in place of native amended soil.   This mixture is referred to as Mel’s Mix and is intended to achieve the same result as double digging – creation of a well aerated, well amended soil, that drains well and provides an optimal growing area for plant roots to develop.   My experience has been that double digging provides more optimal results – but it is a great deal of work to create the beds initially.   Using your native soil but improving it significantly has the advantage of less initial cost and generally contains minerals and other bio elements that a manmade mixture will not provide.   You can learn more about double digging a garden bed HERE.   I think it is an investment that yields significant rewards and once completed really does not need to be done again unless you allow compaction to occur by walking within the beds.   Once double dug a bed can be kept aerated by the periodic use of a broad fork or a garden fork and regular additions of compost - which always improves soil structure.   You can read more about prepping garden beds and specifically about using a broad fork HERE.   The advantage of a double dug garden bed is that you have a growing medium that is rich in nutrients and minerals, allows air and water to reach the plants roots, and encourages the colonization of the soil by beneficial creatures (such as worms) and bacteria to break down organic matter in the soil making even more nutrients available to the plants.   My preference for double digging comes in part because it provides a very deep environment of this greatly improved soil structure for roots to really grow and stretch down into – something a more shallowly cultivated or sealed bottom bed will not provide.   The vitality of plants that have been given really ample room for root growth is very apparent when compared to the same plants grown in less “roomy” conditions.           

Next week, I will continue the blog series and the focus on intensive planting techniques by discussing the concept of closely spacing plants.

I woke up extra early this morning (it happens sometimes) and since I know from experience that forcing myself to get more sleep never works out - I just got up and made use of the additional time.   I pulled up the Word file that has the current garden configuration graphically laid out and began the initial process of moving the crops around to test ideas of what to plant next year and where.   This initial exercise is mainly one of exploring possibilities.   Obviously, I have a lot of time in the coming months to really fine tune next season's garden plan, but it was a good exercise to do this first look while the memory is still fresh on what worked (and what did not) in this year's garden.                                                

Invariably even when the plan is deemed "final" -  I end up changing it (at least somewhat) almost the moment I start planting!   However, it does provide a general blue print and some guidance in the selection of seed varieties.                        

I have initially decided to skip a few crops next year so I can rotate in a crop of dried beans - something I have not grown for at least two years now.   Specifically, I am going to pass on growing beets, kohlrabi, and probably even brussel sprouts, so that I have more room to add a sizeable crop of dried beans.   I confess that I am wavering on the brussel sprouts decision because we love them, but they do occupy a lot of space and for a long time (slow maturing).  

Do you have your garden layout drawn out on graph paper or electronically to allow for this kind of planning process?