 | 
Go Back To Previous Page
 Planning the Home Garden
Excerpt from Four Season Harvest, by Eliot Coleman
Nature programs on television often feature indigenous food gatherers from remote parts of the world who successfully use the jungle or desert as their supermarket. Whatever the season, they instinctively know where to look and what to choose for the ingredients of their diet. Ideally, your home garden can be a similar food jungle-not necessarily in the sense of wild and unrestrained (although if you prefer to garden that way, go for it), but in the sense of a dependable year-round, sustainable larder waiting to be brought to the table.
Many possible garden layouts can give you access to that larder. The easiest ones are usually the best. Organizing and maintaining your garden should be simple, pleasant work. The process of growing and harvesting the food should be just as joyful as the process of preparing and eating it so that you will look forward to both.
We like to have two distinct areas in the garden: space in which to walk and space in which to grow. A direct benefit from this arrangement is improved plant growth. When you walk on garden soil, you exert a pressure of around six to ten pounds per square inch. That pressure closes the soil pores and seriously inhibits root expansion. Compacted soil contains less air. As with the compost heap, air is an important ingredient for optimal soil health, root growth, and microorganism activity. Roots are the invisible yet vital foundation for the above ground parts. When root growth is below par, the whole plant suffers. It is always best to confine your foot traffic to paths between the growing areas.
Our present garden dimensions can serve as an example. Overall, our garden is 43 feet wide east to west and approximately 40 feet north to south. The walking spaces are 12 inches wide and the growing spaces (beds) are 30 inches wide.
The 30-inch wide growing spaces in our home garden are narrower than the 48-inch width used for commercial production. The wide commercial beds are keyed to tractor-based tillage, planting, cultivating, and harvesting equipment. For the home gardener, a 30-inch-wide bed is more sensible. It is easier to step over (from path to path), to straddle if you need to work above it, and to reach across when planting or harvesting.
In our garden, the beds are 20 feet long because that size fits neatly in the 43-foot dimension (the two 20-foot lengths are separated by a 3-foot-wide center path). The beds run east to west for best sun access.
The 30-inch bed width allows ideal spacing for most vegetable crops. If you run rows down the middle of the bed, you can plant hills of corn, double rows of trellised peas, trellised cucumbers and tomatoes, brassica crops, potatoes, zucchini, and so forth. Large storage beets, celery, celeriac, parsnips, and other crops of similar size have adequate space when planted at two rows to the bed. Lettuce, storage carrots, strawberries, and onions are among the crops that grow well at three rows to the bed. You will find specific spacing directions for each crop in appendix A.
You can run many short rows across the bed or along the bed for frequently sown crops or for seedlings that will later be transplanted. These short rows are an easy way to maintain year-round succession plantings. It takes almost no time at all, say once a week, to sow a few short rows of radishes, mesclun mix, carrots, beet greens, arugula, spinach, or lettuce wherever there is an empty spot.
This garden layout is offered as a point of departure for those with no preferences of their own. The dimensions, shape, and scale of this layout are comfortable and efficient. If you feel more comfortable working with ovals, triangles, squares, circles, pentagons, or spirals, use those shapes in your garden layout. The idea is for you to create a garden in which you will want to spend time.
But there is one strong suggestion to be made with respect to layout. Your cropping area, whatever its shape, should be easily divisible. You want to encourage the small succession plantings that characterize a four-season garden. They are the best way to maintain a continual supply of vegetables. Thus, in the space where you have recently harvested some lettuce, you can remove any roots and weeds, mix in a little compost, and plant three or four short rows of carrots. If you have no need for another vegetable planting, you can sow small areas of a legume such as clover or vetch to protect the soil and improve its fertility.
Related Products to this article
 Copyright © 2004-2006 Sparky Boy Enterprises. All rights reserved.
|
 |
