How to plan the best garden ever
By planning how you want your garden to look and function, you are setting yourself up for long-term success. Here are some helpful tips on how to create your best garden this growing season!
The following excerpt is from The resilient gardener: food production and self-reliance in uncertain times By Karol Deppe. It has been adapted for exploit on the Internet.
Plan your garden: rows or beds?
Rows can be great for tractors, but the beds may be easier to water and can support space plantings throughout the growing season.
How many gardens start this way? First, we take out the tiller (or rent a tractor) and cultivate the entire garden.
We allow the buried thatch to decompose for three weeks and then employ a tractor driver or rotational tiller again. Then we try to plant everything at once, preferably before the rain. Rain will compact the soil and make it arduous to create furrows for planting.
Also, if a few weeks pass before planting, the weeds will have such an advantage that we really should re-tilt or hoe the entire area before planting. Therefore, after the second plowing or cultivation, we usually want to plant everything at once.
Planting becomes a bottleneck.
Having to plant everything at once creates an emergency situation. Once we plant everything at once, we will need to weed them. And the entire garden is covered with seedlings, which at the same time require maximum watering.
Many gardens fail because planting has turned into an instant failure and the gardener collapses (exhausted but elated) and forgets about the garden for a while, during this time, the seedlings do not germinate, die from lack of water, or weeds grow too far.
Garden planning: building beds
“Here I am wielding a long-handled hoe, my favorite gardening tool. I bounce the hoe sideways and rock from side to side (from my legs) as I work. It is the lifting motion (using the arm muscles, not the back) that is the power jump. I only guide the tool on the way down, and gravity does all the work on the downward stroke. Notice how I grip the handle, with both hands pointing down and all fingers and thumb wrapped around the handle. This grip allows me to exploit the tool with a straight back and straight wrists.” – Karol Deppe. Photo courtesy of Carol Deppe.
We usually create or renovate beds by digging. Someone has to do the digging, of course. But you don’t have to dig all the beds at once.
Growing in beds is particularly suitable for areas with long growing seasons, gentle winters and year-round gardening, where different beds are planted at different times of the year.
Gardening in flower beds is also typical for perennial or ornamental plantings. When it comes to petite gardens, there is a lot to be said about beds. In many situations they are the only option.
Why build discounts?
A garden bed is a pliable place where you don’t walk. You don’t walk on the beds, even when weeding, harvesting or digging for renovation.
This means that the width must be constrained to what you can comfortably reach on the sides – generally speaking, about 5 feet maximum.
However, beds can be of any length.
I had no choice when it came to bed gardening while growing vegetables in my yard.
Various concrete walls, fences and property lines prevented the tractor from entering the yard. Therefore, it was not possible to employ a tractor driver.
Additionally, there were so many septic tanks and shady areas that the space available for gardening was constrained to petite areas here and there.
Even tilling with a tiller is not practical for petite, scattered beds.
Customizing your garden bed
When we garden in raised beds in the yard, we often automatically do so in raised beds.
When we start with needy soil or the type of soil typical of many yards, we usually add bulky organic materials (leaves, compost, etc.) to support create decent garden soil.
These added materials and all the excavated soil translate into a raised bed. Raised beds have specific benefits and responsibilities.
Raised beds: advantages and disadvantages
In spring, they dehydrated out and heated up faster than the areas planted around them at ground level. This is a large advantage for early plantings in areas with frosty, damp springs (such as Oregon).
Additionally, if water levels are high or the soil is shallow, you may need raised beds to provide deep enough soil for plant roots. However, when there is little or no rain (like summer in Oregon), the fact that raised beds dehydrated out more quickly means they require more habitual watering.
However, the beds do not need to be raised. They may be level with the rest of the ground.
Transient beds
For example, you could start by plowing your garden, then designate certain areas as flower beds and others as paths. Beds don’t have to be enduring either.
Transient beds are not walked on throughout the entire growing season, but are filled in at the end of the season; and next year’s beds may not be in exactly the same places. Even raised beds don’t have to be enduring. You can till the entire garden first and then hoe or till the soil in beds.
You then plant and care for the beds like beds (and avoid walking on them) for just one growing season. Several gigantic organic farms in the area operate largely or entirely on ephemeral raised beds. They till the field and then shape it into raised beds using a tractor-drawn bed shaping tool.
They then treat the beds as beds (and don’t walk on them) for one season before tilling the entire field again.
Choosing what to plant and when
For many years I used a mixed strategy. I grew crops to be harvested for summer meals almost every day in enduring, raised beds in the yard. Then I had a larger, cultivated garden elsewhere where I grew corn, dehydrated beans, and winter squash.
In my yard, I planted about one bed every three weeks, weather permitting.
In February I planted a bed of the first early peas; greens in March and April; tomatoes, pumpkin and green beans in May and June; wintering brassicas in July and August; and garlic, fava beans and peas wintering in October.
My corn, dehydrated bean and winter squash plantations were too gigantic for me to handle as hand-dug beds.
They also had to be planted more or less immediately in May, which fit perfectly into the pattern of calling a tractor driver to cultivate the field. These crops also did not require daily care or harvesting. These are the plants I grew in an arable field far from home.
Growing in intensively planted flowerbeds is a way to obtain the highest possible yields from petite spaces.
However, to obtain such high yields, you need to have very fertile soil, water regularly and plant intensively.
You really thicken the plants compared to classic row plantings. I found that such intensive plantings did not work for me.
Crowded plantings need to be watered almost every day when it does not rain. Here in coastal Oregon, it’s every day starting in June and continuing through the summer.
Photo by the author, Carol Deppe. Courtesy of Carol Deppe.
Increasing the resilience of your garden
Nevertheless, I still lost entire beds here and there whenever my mother’s medical emergency took me away from the garden for a while.
I have learned to minimize the impact of these emergencies on my gardening by not planting more than one bed every three weeks.
This way I only had one bed at a time, at the most sensitive time of watering or weeding.
Whenever an unforeseen event left me without my garden for a while, if I lost something, it was usually just one bed, not all of them. I’m not the type of person who feels like watering or doing other chores every day with my rekordhers, even in the best of times.
During the period when I was caring for my mother, I used all my ability to perform these types of tasks in the caregiving situation.
However, garden beds do not have to be planted intensively.
If I planted the beds in an area about 50 percent larger than typical for intensive beds, the watering pressure would not be sufficient. I found that I could water every other day or even skip two days without much problem.
Currently, Nate and I only grow in a classic row garden with wide row spacing.
We arrange things so that once a week we can water only the plants that are most dependent on moisture (tomatoes, full-season corn, melons and kale) and the plants that need the least water (potatoes) at all. This reduces the total amount of water needed and the work involved in watering.
This garden can survive and thrive if left undisturbed for a week, even during the worst summer heat, and much longer the rest of the time. Nate doesn’t like everyday chores as much as I do.
Until I expanded into a much larger, leased garden elsewhere (and with a co-worker), backyard garden beds were an indispensable part of my strategy. And I simply didn’t have the space to give the plants the space they needed for weekly watering and greater water tolerance.
Gardening, like the rest of life, is full of compromises.