The Modern Victory Garden

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.