I get some resistance to treating our own garden more like a garden and less like a farm. But I'm starting to introduce the ideas of gardening beds where rows are not practical. This is a farming region, and people are used to farming. There is less interest in gardening than there might be in some non-farming areas, interestingly enough. Following are some ideas which might inspire you to consider gardening.
1. Square Foot Gardening
The link above takes you to an Amazon video about Mel Bartholomew's famous Square Foot Gardening system. Check out the written summary of his Latest Improvements here. There is much more emphasis on making gardening easy than in the original book. These changes are included in a 2006 book, All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow More in Less Space! which is recommended by the Cox family.
It appears to be out of print at the moment, but I recently bought a copy. Major changes from the original book include:
(a) Drip irrigation
(b) Raised beds filled with soilless mix and lined with weed-stopping landscape cloth
(c) Wider aisles between beds for easier maneuvering.
I would also recommend lining the bottoms of beds with galvanized 1/4 inch hardware cloth if there are gophers or moles in your neighborhood. These beds require the outlay of a little money at first, but will pay off in the long run. There's also a new cookbook to go with the new gardening book. Fun video.
In cold-winter climates, raised beds have the advantage of warming up faster in the spring. In a hot-summer climate like ours, they carry potential disadvantages of faster loss of water and sometimes salt accumulation at the surface. These problems can be lessened through the inclusion of water-retentive materials in the soil mix, mulching (as with reflective mulch which also repels bugs) and through periodic soil leaching. In windy desert climates, sometimes beds are build lower than the surrounding land. If you're ambitious, you could try this.
2. Weedless Gardening
This is a cheaper alternative which allows you to use your native soil (still utilizing beds rather than rows), Lee Reich, a former agricultural researcher, wrote a book which provides a scientific rationale for Ruth Stout's emphasis on mulching, but does not require you to have as much mulching material as Stout originally recommended. I love the title to Stout's book linked above, but haven't read it.
Reich recommends laying down four sheets of newsprint over the soil, covering it with mulch, and planting seeds in the mulch. Lots of people swear by it, as long as there are no really nasty weeds (like certain perennial grasses) in the soil. I used a modification of this system on some tomato beds, and it really did eliminate weeds.
3. Cinder Block Gardens
The photo shows my first cinder block garden, containing young plants for my hybridization experiment for last year: Bidwell Casaba x Small Persian Melon. I'll plant some of the resulting seeds this year. You can use pretty much all of the same techniques as the Square Foot Gardening, though bed dimensions will be a little different (up to 40 inches wide in the planting space, 55 inches wide on the exterior if the unit is 3.5 blocks wide). If your ground is level, you need no tools except maybe a hammer to drive stakes and a level to check your work. The beds should be level. If you build it on, say, level concrete, you may not need any tools at all. These beds can be easily dismantled and moved if necessary.
The bed pictured above is narrow because it is against a fence. It required a couple of short (8-inch) blocks. It's made of "lightweight" cinderblocks (thinner). If you build your frame two 8-inch cinder blocks high or three 6-inch cinder blocks high and cap it, you can sit on it (lay the blocks on halves, as with brickwork, if you use more than one layer of blocks). The neighbors' yards near this bed are full of gophers, so I lined this little bed with hardware cloth. This size bed allowed me to use an entire 2-foot wide roll of 1/4 inch galvanized hardware cloth without cutting. Lining the entire planting area with commercial-grade weed block before laying out beds eliminates weeds in the aisles, too. Eventually, you would want to cover the aisles with wood chips, gravel, or something similar. This advice also holds true for square foot gardens.
Fill the cavities in the blocks with native soil or sand. You can also secure with stakes like I did. I wonder if bottles of water in the cavities would moderate temperatures? I used a soilless mix (potting soil) for the bed itself.
Cinder blocks wick water, so I lined the inside surfaces (NOT the bottom of the bed) with plastic and topped them with foil to repel aphids and whiteflies. In more moderate climates, you can plant herbs or some veggies in the cavities of the cinder blocks.
4. Self-watering containers
If you're short on space or time, try these. GardenWeb is a good source of information. One commercial type is the "Earthbox", typically big enough to hold two indeterminate (staked or caged with a PVC pipe support which fits around the container - see photos in thread at the last link) or up to four determinate or short-node indeterminate tomato plants. Someone put some thought into this system. You can also make your own containers. Do a little research first.
Have fun. Don't get too ambitious all at once.
2 comments:
We have a square foot garden. It is amazing the amount of vegetables that you can fit in one square foot and the variety of vegetables that you can plant in a box and so close together. Square foot gardening is a great option if you do not have a big back yard. My husband did have to make an awesome net cage to go over and around our garden because we had birds that were constantly eating our tomatoes.
A net cage is a great idea if you have bird problems. You can also make little 1 x 1 foot cages if birds eat your seedlings.
We have more problems with gophers and other burrowing critters here, so it's a good idea to line the bottoms of beds with 1/4 inch hardware cloth (kind of a heavy-duty screen with bigger holes.)
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