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Soil Building – How to Make Deep Rich Soils by Imitating Nature

by papprentice 34 Comments


Soil building is one of the most important aspects of regenerative land stewardship.

If you are into permaculture or regenerative agriculture, you’ll know that everything revolves around healthy soil. Soil rich in nutrients, organic matter, and beneficial microorganisms supports healthy plant growth, which, in turn, supports a thriving ecosystem.

In short, everything starts with healthy soil.

Want to improve your soil the permaculture way? Skip the guesswork and use this FREE Checklist as your reference.

In this post, I’ll try to demystify the process of soil building the permaculture way entails and how you can apply it on your land.

This topic is very close to my heart because when I started with my property, I was disappointed to find out that my soil was shallow, compacted, alkaline, and sometimes waterlogged for months. I had ambitious goals for annual gardens, food forests, and perennial grasslands.

After delving deeper into the topic, I realized that my only two options are importing good soil (not feasible) or improving the soil I already have. The latter offers me the chance to regenerate the soil and learn more about soil biology, so I’ve embraced the soil-building challenge head-on.

In my research, I discovered something fascinating: there are more microorganisms in a teaspoonful of healthy soil than there are people in the world. And when we add in earthworms, nematodes, and other soil life, we can see that there is much more to soil than we realize looking down from above.

We in permaculture should try to replicate this kind of biological richness in our food-growing systems. But what I’ve learned is that emulating a grassland is different than emulating a forest, and for this reason, you first have to be clear on which ecosystem you’re trying to copy. Here is why.

Ecological succession as a model for improving the soil

soil building succession

Ecological succession is a process of change in the species’ structure over time. The established species influence the soil composition and alter it over time.

As you can see from my sketches above, there is a significant difference in soil found in the bare field than in the forest.

The weight of fungi in forest soils is much greater than that of bacteria. In grasslands, however, there is an equal distribution of the two. In agricultural soils that are routinely tilled, in contrast, the weight of fungi is less than that of bacteria.

But how does this apply to me, you may ask? 

Suppose you are trying to create a healthy pasture, a self-fertilizing food forest, or even just a productive annual garden. In that case, you must simulate the conditions where the intended plants are found initially.

So, let’s look at the three most common situations you’ll face on your farm: annual gardens, grasslands, and food forests, and see what steps you can take to bring your soil to life.

Want to improve your soil the permaculture way? Skip the guesswork and use this FREE Checklist as your reference.

How to Make Rich Soil Scenario 1: Annual Gardens/Market Gardens

soil buiding scenario 1

Annual plants colonize bare soil following a disturbance. As they wither and die at the end of their growing season, their remains fall on the ground and act as mulch that bacteria and earthworms feed upon.

This cycle repeats itself annually, with organic matter building and creating humus. Here is what to do in your soil building efforts to replicate these conditions.

  • Don’t disturb the subsoil and encourage biological tillage

As seen in nature, to establish annuals, you have to intervene mechanically to prepare beds for crop planting and establishment. However, you don’t want to till deep as you don’t want to disturb the soil structure.

The undisturbed subsoil lets earthworms dig their tunnels and provides aeration and drainage while their exertions bind together soil crumbs. They are essential in healthy soil structure and replace mechanical with biological tillage.

If you don’t compromise earthworms, microbes, and other soil organisms through soil inversion, they can perform much of the tillage needed to create and maintain loose, fertile soils.

However, suppose your soils are biologically dead. In that case, those microbes have to come from somewhere. That is why we sometimes need to feed the soil with biologically-active decomposed organic matter rich in beneficial microbes – the compost.

  • Bring your soil to life with compost

Good compost supplies both the organic matter for soil building and the fertilizer for the crops; most importantly, it’s packed with soil organisms that trigger biological activity. It inoculates your soil with microbes that will digest nutrients present in the soil and feed your plants.

Compost is the key ingredient for building and maintaining healthy soil. Because of its unique characteristics, compost cannot simply be replaced with manure, natural fertilizers, or green manure. If you’ve just moved to a new garden and want productivity, compost will rapidly make your soils fertile.

  • Maintain organic matter with mulch

Once you have your soil biology working for you, you need to feed it so it can feed your plants. There are several ways to maintain soil organic matter in your annual garden, and one of the easiest is using lawn grass clippings, leaves, straw or cover crops, and, of course, compost.

The mulch is then left on the surface to decompose. Adding this layer of organic matter and spreading it is, in effect, ‘composting in place’, where the garden beds become large composting areas. 

Then by the actions of earthworms, bacteria, fungi, and insects, the organic matter is slowly broken down and released into the soil, providing nutrients to the garden.

While all this sounds great, if you are running a market garden operation, this practice is restrictive and somewhat impractical. Here is what JM Fortier in his book The Market Gardener has to say: “Based on my experience, direct seeding into crop residues, mulch, or crimped down cover crops is not straightforward, causing unpredictable germination rates – a nightmare for any commercial grower.” Something we should bear in mind.

  • Use crop rotation to mimic diversity

With crop rotation, you can mimic the diversity of annual plants growing on a bare field. Differing root systems among plants penetrate the soil to different depths, improving its structure.

By ensuring crop diversity and alternating crops, you allow the soil to keep producing without being drained of its nutrients while eliminating a number of diseases and harmful insects that often occur when one species is continuously cropped.

How to Make Rich Soil Scenario 2: Grasslands – Pasture/Cropland

soil building scenario 2

As we move in succession, the perennial grasses are slowly taking over.

Big herbivores are roaming in herds feeding off these grasses, trampling them down, and fertilizing the soils. Over long periods of time, organic matter builds up, and now we have fungi and mycelium with bacteria equally represented.

Here’s what your soil building efforts should involve.

  • Don’t disturb the soil – ensure the lowest level of mechanical disturbance possible

Unless you need to repair the compacted soil, poor drainage, or do some initial tillage to sow the perennial cover, you should aim for no till, no compaction, and the lowest possible mechanical disturbance.

Make your tillage minimal!

Here the goal is the same as with an annual garden, enabling the biological tillage but also taking advantage of the mycorrhizal fungi, which form symbiotic relationships with the roots, extending the plant’s root network. 

They also prevent pathogens and improve water use efficiency and absorption of other nutrients. 

  • Always keep your soil covered with perennial cover crops

If we look at perennial native ranges, we can see they are permanently covered. 

So the first step to rebuilding soil structure and health of grassland is to get it under perennial cover, which then acts like armor for the soil. 

Bare soil is detrimental to its health, and you only find bare soil in catastrophic events or where humans have imposed their will upon it.

Cover crops are planted specifically to build and hold soil and to smother weeds. They range from long-growing perennials to short-term green manures, but the aim is the same: a solid cover of plants. Their leaves will protect the soil from hammering rains, and eventually, their residue carpets the surface with nutritious, humus-building matter. 

Want to improve your soil the permaculture way? Skip the guesswork and use this FREE Checklist as your reference.
  • Plant diverse perennial cover crops

Once again, if you look at native perennial ecosystems, we can see diversity. 

Rather than resorting to one or two species of cover crops, they should be seeded as multi-species combinations, through doing so, you are mimicking what nature does. 

You optimize solar energy collection as different plants have differently shaped leaves. Because the roots penetrate varying depths, the mycorrhizal fungi can deliver moisture and nutrients from the other areas of the soil profile.

You can design your cover crops to address your specific concerns:

  • Protecting the soil as living mulches
  • Adding organic matter as green manure
  • Boosting fertility with N fixing legumes
  • Dealing with compaction

Even if you are using your grassland to grow cash crops, you can maximize your profits by mixing cover crops. Cover crops can be sown before, with, or after the cash crop, so you always have something growing.

  • Planned disturbance in a form of animal impact and planned grazing

In nature, soils are formed in conjunction with herbivores. In this case, through large herds of herbivores moving across the planes, but also by other local wildlife; rabbits, grasshoppers, and other insects. All of them are taking this forage, the biomass, and endlessly recycling it.

Animals are an integral part of a healthy ecosystem. But how can they help you to build healthy soil?

A prime example of building soil with big herbivores is the holistic planned grazing practice conducted by Allan Savory and others like Greg Judy. They use high-density animal herds that graze a paddock for one day before being moved to the next paddock. Joel Salatin has a similar technique and a grazing plan with a high-density herd impact and ample recovery time.

The goal is for animals to consume a third of the grass in the paddock and trample the rest into the soil to feed earthworms and soil microbes, thus replicating the natural herds of large grazers coevolved with grasses.

How to Make Rich Soil Scenario 3: Food Forests/Permaculture Orchards

Martin Crawford's garden 150dpi

With time almost every ecosystem will eventually end up forest-like.

In a forest, organic matter in the form of fallen leaves, twigs and branches, and dying plants are all deposited on the forest floor, where they are decomposed into rich humus by the action of fungi and other organisms.

Fungal fabrics, the mycelium, run through the top few inches and act as interfaces between plant roots and nutrients, bringing distant nutrients and moisture to the host plant and extending the absorption zone well beyond the root structure.

No tree could reach maturity without this symbiotic relationship.

Food forests are actually younger versions of mature forests. In his book Creating Forest Gardens, Martin Crawford explains- “A food forest is a forest modeled on the structure of young natural woodland, and it often contains nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs, which are pioneer species, establishing quickly and improving soil and environmental conditions for other trees to follow.”

If you are starting from scratch, let’s see what soil building activities you should focus on to transform a bare land into a food forest.

  • Improve your soil with green manures and transitional ground-covers

Preparing the soil before planting offers certain advantages. A year of cover cropping and woody mulching offers a chance to build organic matter, correct fertility imbalances, and, most importantly, accelerate fungal dominance.

Fruit trees generally prefer high-quality soil, so it is vital to achieve a good layer of humus and try to use as much biomass as possible on the soil.

Following the initial tillage or sheet mulching, existing grasses will generally be ready for cover crops, preferably red or crimson clover, as these two nitrogen-fixing legumes have a stronger affinity for mycorrhizal fungi.

Other Legumes and dynamic accumulator plants are also acceptable, and these can even be oversown into existing grasses.

  • Inoculate your soil with mycorrhizal fungi  

Food Forest soils ideally contain a fungal presence ten times higher than bacteria. If you’re starting with a bare field with no fungi present, you can encourage mycorrhizal associations through inoculation with fungi. Here is what Michael Crawford recommends in his book Creating Forest Gardens:

  • Dip exposed roots of seedlings into water enriched with the spore mass of one or more mycorrhizal species. 
  •  Broadcast spores onto the root zones of existing trees and shrubs using spores in a water carrier.
  • Place a little soil from the root zone of proven mushroom-producing trees around seedlings in the nursery or soon after planting.
  •  Inoculate the compost of pot-grown plants with a mixture of dried spores from suitable species.
  •   When planting trees or shrubs, scatter a dry spore mixture into the planting hole.
  •   Use woody mulch to feed the fungi.

Compost, deciduous wood chips, and other woody material can be added on top of the green manure crops. The woody material is what drives the fungal dominance you want for a healthy food forest. 

The goal, plain and simple, is to create what Michael Phillips in Holistic Orchard calls fungal duff – the litter layer where mineralization and humification take place through the action of fungi.

Mulching with wood chips and chopping and dropping woody plant material on the ground helps mycorrhizae thrive. This fungal connection provides the balanced nutrition necessary for a tree to better withstand disease.

  • Create self-sustaining fertility with nitrogen fixing trees and dynamic accumulator plants

The self-fertilizing nature of the food forest comes from using nitrogen-fixing plants and other plants like comfrey that are particularly good at raising nutrients from the subsoil. Through their use, efficient nutrient cycling develops in a forest-like system, maximizing fertility for other plants to grow.

Nitrogen fixers are extremely useful fertility providers in a food forest. Techniques like ‘chop and drop’ mulches, coppicing, and pollarding from these plants, in particular, can release the nutrients they have extracted over time from the earth or air. ‘

Simply having them shed leaves on the ground can improve fertility. There are many nitrogen-fixing plants at each level of the food forest, and I recommend reading Martin Crawford’s book for a comprehensive list.

Want to improve your soil the permaculture way? Skip the guesswork and use this FREE Checklist as your reference.

Conclusions

With each scenario outlined above, you strive for the highest percentage of organic matter in your soil and provide habitats for a high diversity of soil food web organisms. 

In an annual garden, this would be geared toward bacteria, and in a forest garden, more toward mycorrhizal fungi. 

The easiest way to know your plants’ needs is to ask yourself: “Where did the plant grow natively, Field or Forest?

Depending on the type of system you wish to achieve, bring animals into the system in any way you can. They help with organic matter and nutrient cycling: earthworms, herbivores, and poultry all are integral to system health.

And always remember nature is our greatest teacher. Working in harmony with nature is always the best way to proceed, so whatever you plan to do, ask yourself: “What would nature do? How would this system I’m trying to set up look naturally? And then adapt it to your circumstances.

Hope this helps in your endeavors. Let me know what you think in the comments!

How to Choose the Most Suitable Plants for Your Food Forest

by papprentice Leave a Comment

When it comes to growing plants in your food forest you always have two choices:

Option 1. Adapt the plants to your site conditions; OR

Option 2. Adapt your site conditions to the plants.

The option of adapting your site conditions to the plants is definitely one where you’ll need to continuously put extra effort into taking care of your plants in order for them to grow and produce an abundance of crops.

For example, if you want to grow blueberries in an arid climate, in a shallow alkaline soil, you’ll need to lower the soil’s pH, build soil depth (or create mounds), provide continuous irrigation… the blueberry plant is not adapted to these types of site conditions, so it needs help to grow.

Sometimes this additional effort might be worth the trouble, but more often than not, you’ll discover, after a few years of stunted growth, that you need to replace your plants with something different. That is, if the plants don’t die on you in year 1 and save you time…

To make growing your food forest easier on you, and your wallet, you’ll want to adapt the plants to your site conditions. This is the option where you’ll have lower inputs, perform less maintenance and where the plants will thrive almost on their own.

However, for this to work, you’ll have to choose the right type of plants.

Now, choosing the most suitable plants for your food forest can be a difficult task, primarily because there are so many different factors you need to consider. What’s your climate, what’s your specific soil conditions, what’s your plant hardiness zone, etc.

Although these are all important questions and ones you should always be looking for answers to, there is an easier way; a shortcut let’s say, to help you make this plant selection.

The best part?

It virtually guarantees that you’ll choose the right plants.

I call this “The not-reinventing-the-wheel approach to choosing plants”. With this method, you are using your native ecosystem as a model and, on this basis, selecting plants which are most likely to succeed.

For this, all you need is a notebook and a little bit of skill in recognizing plants.

To better explain this, I’ll give you a real-life example from my farm and we’ll work through this process of making a list together.

So when I go outside on my site, here’s what I see:

It’s a beautiful view but, admiration aside, let’s put our permaculture land assessment hat on and study it more thoroughly. Here’s what you would need to do.

Step 1. Prepare a notebook

You’ll need to write down your insights about the plants into a notebook – this can be hardcopy or digital, the choice is yours. I use a combination of both, i.e., when on the site I put my observations in the hardcopy notebook and, later on at home, I fill out a digital database where I collate all the info.

In the notebook, you should have three columns:

  • First, species name – the observed plant species’ name.
  • Second, layer – the layer it occupies: overstory (canopy layer), understory (shrub layer), herb and ground layer, vines.
  • Third, observed preferences of the plant (sun, soil, location) – the specific microclimate conditions in which it grows.

You can also do this on your computer. Here’s a spreadsheet template for this kind of notebook if you prefer to use a digital one.

Step 2. Observe the native plants in the wild

Now the key to this method is to observe and find wild-growing “useful” plant species of your bioregion, your local area, your site. These are the plant species that are perfectly adapted to your climate and soil conditions. That’s what we’re after.

So every time you go for a walk around your land or anywhere else in nature, take your notebook and keep an eye out for anything interesting. You’re looking for food-producing trees and shrubs, edible and medicinal herbaceous perennials, food-producing ground covers and vines…

Let’s come back to the example from my farm and identify the plant species in the photo.

Now, while recognizing common fruit- and nut-producing plants is relatively easy and straightforward, other plants can be a bit trickier.

If you are having trouble with recognizing plants, you can either:

  • get field guides for your region (they’ll have a list and description of species you can encounter), or
  • take a photo with your smartphone and use online communities or smartphone apps to help you identify the plant.

Step 3. Write down your insights into the notebook

The final step is to note down the info about the plant species you’ve observed.

Write down the species names, the layer they occupy and add some details about the environment you’ve found them in, e.g., waterlogged soil, marshy land, south-facing slope… (everything you write down here we’ll be useful later on).

Okay, so the native ecosystem model method has shown me that the most suitable plants for my food forest are plums, hazelnuts, apples, and dandelions, and, in addition to that, (not clearly seen in the image), thyme, rosehips, elderberry…

These are the plant species I should be planting in my food forest and these are the plants I should be combining into guilds. Absolutely no reinvention of the wheel is necessary.

By using the method I just showed you, you’ll ensure that you end up selecting the best-suited plant species for your food forest. That’s a foundational step in the overall food forest design.

Once you are ready to plant, you will need to find commercial variants of these species in your local nurseries or propagate the wild variants yourself.

Here’s a practical guide on how to propagate trees and shrubs you find in the wild.

Happy growing,

-William

Crisis Gardening: How to prepare your garden beds for planting

by papprentice Leave a Comment

This is the last post in my series on crisis gardening.

So far we covered planning how much to grow, choosing the most suitable location for the crisis garden, and designing a crisis garden layout. Now today we’ll talk about garden bed preparations.

In this guide, I’ll outline my method for preparing garden beds for planting. This is a method I specifically use for rebuilding or sustaining the soil fertility in pre-existing garden beds. The initial garden preparation might differ slightly in that you’ll need to remove the existing vegetation, most likely grass or a lawn, to start a garden bed.

To grow vegetables in your crisis garden and ensure continuous and reliable yields you’ll have to make sure that your soil, in addition to the good structure, has the nutrients the veggies need for their growth. The vegetables are very demanding and perform poorly if the soil fertility is lacking. Also, as they grow, they will deplete nutrients more than most other plants found in nature.

Therefore, managing soil fertility will always be a crucial task in prepping both new and existing garden beds. You’ll have to do this through adding appropriate amendments, organic fertilizers, and compost.

With soil amendments and organic fertilizers, you’ll be able to address certain soil deficiencies and provide plants with readily available micro- and macronutrients. And by adding organic matter you can provide both fuel and a habitat for all soil organisms, and build soil structure as a result.

Okay, so here are the precise steps on how to prepare garden beds for planting.

STEP 1. Remove the existing vegetation

If you are starting from scratch you can do this by removing the sod by hand, sheet mulching, or good old tilling the ground with a shovel or a machine.

I prefer the no-till methods but even if you decide to till the ground, you’ll only have to do it this once to break the ground so to speak, while later on you can do the no-till as you’ll just keep adding compost on top.

In case you already have crops going in your bed, you start by pulling out and clearing all the previous crops. Pull them from the base of the plant and shake off the soil so that you’re not moving soil around. It’s best to keep as much soil intact as you can.

STEP 2. Aerate the soil

Regardless of how you decide to start in step 1, the next step is always to let some air into the soil. For this you can use a broadfork or digging fork to loosen the subsoil on your beds.

So take your broadfork/digging fork and apply pressure with one foot to press the tines into the soil, then pull back on the handles to lift and loosen the lower soil slightly. Raise the tines out of the soil, move 6 in (15 cm) further back, and repeat the sequence until you make a full pass down the bed.

STEP 3. Add appropriate soil amendments/organic fertilizers

Now add soil amendments/fertilizer onto the bed’s surface. Which ones you’ll use depends on the nature of the deficiencies of your soil.

Here are some soil amendments/organic fertilizers you can use:

  • Bonemeal or Phosphate Rock — Slow-release sources of phosphorus, useful for fruiting veggies like tomatoes.
  • Alfalfa Meal — A quick-acting source of nitrogen and some potassium. Also it’s very high in trace minerals.
  • Kelp — Supplies a range of trace nutrients, as well as a dose of plant hormones.
  • Blood meal — A good source of nitrogen.
  • Wood Ash — High in potassium and has an alkaline effect on the soil. Lasts 6 months.
  • Aged Manure — Nutrients are rapidly available to plants; the amount of nutrients will vary widely, depending on the type of animal, the bedding material used for the animal, and how long the manure has been aged.

When in doubt use poultry manure as this will supply the necessary nitrogen for the early stages of the plant growth when they need it the most for fast development. Later on, the compost will take over the job of releasing the rest of the required nutrients for optimum growth.

STEP 4. Mix the amendments/organic fertilizers into the soil

Use simple hand tools to mix the amendments/organic fertilizers into the soil. Here you should work only the top 2 in (5 cm) of the soil. This way you do not disturb the soil structure, and you avoid disturbing dormant weeds and bringing them to the surface to germinate.

Take a rake or a digging fork and mix in your amendments/organic fertilizers into the top of the soil. Pay attention to spreading the amendments/organic fertilizers evenly.

STEP 5. Apply compost

Finally, spread a layer of well-finished compost on the soil. Use a roughly 5-gal bucket (20 l) for every 10 ft (3 m) of 30-inch-wide (0.7 m) bed. For raised beds that would be approximately a bit less than two 5-gal buckets (40 l).

Rake the bed smooth, mix in shallowly, level up as necessary.

Now your beds are ready to plant!


All right, so that was my method of preparing beds for planting – it’s easy and effective and it works. I do this when I’m prepping new beds for planting for the first time, and every time for putting existing beds back to production after a harvest.

For existing raised beds, it takes me some 15 minutes to do the prep and have the bed replenished and ready to be back in production.

If you found this post helpful, make sure to subscribe to my newsletter where I share practical tips like this and other content that’s exclusive to my email list.

Talk soon,

-William

Crisis garden layout: the three-step permaculture design method

by papprentice Leave a Comment

Once you’ve picked the best spot for your crisis garden, it’s time to start working out the specifics of how it’s going to look.

You should already have an idea of what you’ll grow and in what amounts, so now let’s see how to lay out the available space.

Properly laying out the crisis garden ensures that it’s accessible and manageable and that your vegetables receive adequate amounts of essential inputs such as sun, water, and nutrients from the soil. 

Even if you’ve chosen a location that ticks many of the boxes outlined in the last step, the inappropriate type of beds, wrong bed orientation, and poor design of space could render many of these advantages worthless.

The layout of your crisis garden, now that the location is fixed, will primarily be determined by the size and shape of the land you have available. With more land available for your garden, you’ll have greater design flexibility, with less, your design solutions will be somewhat predetermined.

In this post, I want to outline a three-step permaculture design method for creating the best layout for your crisis garden. I’ll use the examples of my suburban home, my rural farm, and my parents’ place to illustrate the design concepts I’ll explain in the coming paragraphs.

So grab some paper or use a whiteboard or your computer and let’s create the ideal layout for your crisis garden.

STEP 1. DECIDE WHAT TYPE OF GARDEN BEDS YOU’LL USE

Before you start sketching, first you’ll have to decide what type of garden beds you’ll use in your crisis garden.

Although there are many different ways to grow your vegetables, here we’ll focus on three main types of garden beds: in-ground garden beds, raised beds and hugelbeds.

You’ll have to decide which of these is most appropriate according to your climate and context. Here is some brief information about each of them:

In-ground beds

Main crop garden at Zaytuna Farm, image source: https://www.zaytunafarm.com

This is the basic annual gardening method practiced for thousands of years, suitable for both home and, if necessary, larger-scale commercial food production that can bring you a side income in these challenging times.

In-ground beds are the cheapest and the least labor-intensive way to start your crisis garden. If your soil’s texture is good enough, and you’re not drowning in excess water, this will be the easiest way to kickstart your crisis garden.

The big advantage of in-ground beds is that you can use a tractor, a walk-behind tractor, and other machinery to do much of the labor to prepare your garden for planting. This allows you to quickly scale your operation if required.

Raised beds

Raised garden beds are elevated garden beds that sit higher than the surrounding soil and are usually supported by some sort of frame or enclosure. You can build them in a variety of ways; out of wood, concrete, stone, or bricks… all kinds of different things.

They are a better option than in-ground garden beds if you have poor-quality soil because you can introduce a different soil type to your raised bed. 

They offer several other important advantages over in-ground beds, such as that they warm up quicker in spring, drain better, and are easier on your back, and you can manage them more efficiently.

However, raised beds are not the simple ‘plow and play’ solution that the in-ground beds are. They can be costly to make in terms of resources and labor required to build them, and since you can’t use machines you are forced to use hand equipment and simple manual tools to manage it.

Hugelbeds

Hugelbeds are nothing more than raised garden beds filled with rotten wood. You can either dig a trench and fill it with wood or just pile the wood on the ground and cover it with soil.

The wood loads your raised garden bed with organic matter and nutrients that are slowly released over the years as they decompose, ultimately helping you to grow typical garden crops with no irrigation or fertilization. The huglebeds, as they were envisioned in their original form, are also very high, so you don’t have to bend over while managing them. 

Although the benefits of hugelbeds are obvious and very much desirable, they are labor-intensive as they involve moving a lot of soil around and hauling decomposing wood from somewhere. Building hugelbeds by hand will require a great deal of time and energy, so they don’t scale easily unless you have a machine that can do the digging and moving the soil around for you.

Action item: —> Choose the appropriate type of garden bed based on your climate and context.

What I’m doing:

I’m a big fan of raised beds, and I use them in my suburban home plot and on my rural farm.

The soil at my suburban home is terrible, so I needed a way to introduce better soil and build it on top of what’s essentially a crushed rock top layer. 

On the farm, bad soil is not an issue, but raised beds perform better than in-ground beds as they warm more quickly (the farm is at high altitude), they are easier to maintain, and they keep the ground level weeds away.

We use in-ground beds on my parents’ place as the growing area is bigger, and they till the soil with a walk-behind tractor to get the garden ready every year for planting.

STEP 2. CHOOSE THE ORIENTATION OF YOUR GARDEN BEDS

Image source: Elliot Coleman – The new organic grower

Once you know what type of beds you’ll be using, let’s now determine the best way to orient them.

Several factors will influence how you should orient your garden beds, and it all depends on your local context. The three main aspects to consider are solar access, rainfall, and slope. Here are some useful pointers to help you decide:

  • If you live in an area that has dry periods and you need to catch and soak the water, then follow the contours with your beds.
  • If the slope is steep and you want to avoid erosion, try keep the beds relatively perpendicular to the slope, or follow the contours.
  • If you have a choice, orient the beds sideways to the sun (N-S). This is ideal as then every row receives the same sunlight exposure during the day.
  • If maximizing sun is not your priority and you have too much heat, then orient your beds E-W so that you can create shade with taller crops on the side facing the sun.

Action item: —> Choose the appropriate orientation of your garden beds

What I’m doing:

Limitations of available space more or less predetermine the orientation of my raised garden beds at my suburban home, so I wasn’t consciously orienting them.

On the farm, the beds are more or less oriented N-S, which is the ideal.

My parents’ field block is on a gentle slope with an east aspect that receives plenty of sun throughout the day. The general orientation of the beds will be N-S, while only rows of potatoes to the right of the beds will be planted parallel to the slope so they more effectively drain excess water.

STEP 3. DESIGNING THE LAYOUT OF YOUR GARDEN BEDS

Now we can start designing and deciding how to best use the available space.

No matter what the size and shape of the growing area will be, you should first somehow subdivide it into workable sections; a series of several smaller-sized plots (field blocks) that are ideally of equal size, shape, and length.

For example, blocks of 100 x 200 feet (30 x 60 meters) or 50 x 100 feet (15 x 30 meters) or smaller all depending on the size of your growing area. All the while leaving enough space, some 5 – 10 feet (1.5 – 3 meters), on either end to allow for access.

Standardizing the block size in this way helps with access, calculating input and production information, general organization, and, most importantly, management.

Through using this method, it’s easy to keep an eye on everything, and you can group together vegetables belonging to either the same botanical family or that have similar fertilization requirements.

Action item: —> Subdivide your growing area into several smaller-sized field blocks of the same size, shape and length.

What I’m doing: 

Since around my suburban home, I’m limited by space, I haven’t been able to subdivide the growing area in the described way precisely, but I’ve done this based on the different microclimates/crop categories. I have three distinctive areas: one where I group my staple crops such as potatoes, carrots, onions, and cabbages. One for year-round greens, these are mostly grown in and around the mini-greenhouse and a supplemental crop area that only has enough sunlight during the spring/summer.

On my parents’ field block, we’ll mostly be growing staple crops, so we divided this category into field blocks of potatoes, squashes, tomatoes, carrots, onions, and beetroots, with the remainder being a supplemental group of crops. There is some room – approximately 0.5 m (1.5 feet) on our ends – for access.

Okay, so with that, here are the dimension specifications for each individual garden bed type:

In-ground garden beds

Image source: JM Fourtier – The market gardener

  •  Width

The standard width for in-ground beds is 30 inches (75 centimeters).

This is narrow enough to step over (from path to path), to straddle if you need to work above it, and to reach across when planting or harvesting. Moreover, it’s a standard width that most of today’s market gardening tools are made for.

If you plan on only using hand tools and a walk-behind tractor, a 30-inch (75-centimeter) bed system is recommended. But, of course, you can make them wider as long as you can cultivate them easily.

For a larger-scale commercial production with tractor-based tillage, planting, cultivating, and harvesting equipment, your beds would need to be 60 inches (150 centimeters) wide.

  •  Length

You can adapt the length of your in-ground garden beds to your particular production scale. It can be as long as the size of the whole field block or less; for example, 100 feet (30 meters) long as the size of the whole block, or 30 feet (10 meters), or any other length. 

The thing to keep in mind is that all beds should be of a uniform length as this also renders all other equipment (tarps, irrigation pipes, row covers, etc.) uniform.

  •  Spacing

The pathways should be wide enough to allow the passage of a wheelbarrow or to work in a crouching position without damaging the adjacent bed. This can be a strip of 18 inches (45 centimeters) minimum, or wider if necessary.

Raised garden beds

  •  Width

The best width for a raised bed is 3 – 4 feet (90 – 120 centimeters), dependent on your reach; 4 feet (120 centimeters) being the standard width. Your aim is to make the middle of the bed reachable from both sides without stepping on the soil.

Beds against a wall or fence should be about 2 – 3 feet (60 – 90 centimeters) wide, as you’ll only have access from one side. I make them 3 feet (90 cm) as I want to maximize the growing surface area, which requires more bending but also more veggies.

As with the in-ground beds, standardizing the width of the beds will allow you to customize row covers and cloches so that they can be moved from bed to bed as needed.

  •  Length

The length of raised beds is a matter of personal preference. But since you can’t step over the raised bed, consider how far you are willing to walk to get around to the other side. Eight feet (2.4 meters) is the standard length, with 10 feet (3 meters) usually being the maximum length.

  •  Spacing

Leave enough space between the beds to walk, mow, or push a wheelbarrow through them.

Around 30 centimeters (1 foot) is the minimum width for walking and 45 centimeters (18 inches) is the minimum width for wheelbarrows, and 50 centimeters (20 inches) or more for mowing and easier access.

Hugelbeds

Hügelkultur beds vary in width and size. However, in general, the bigger the better, because more material means they will grow more plants and last longer. The recommended width is 4 – 5 feet wide (1.2 – 1.5 meters)

 • Length

You can construct hugelbeds that are shorter (1.2 meters or 4 foot), longer (2.4 meters or 8 foot), or even continuous!

 • Spacing

As with raised beds, leave enough space for: walking – min. 45 centimeters (18 inches), wheelbarrows – min. 50 centimeters (20 inches), mowing – min. 50 centimeters (20 inches) or more.

Action item: —> Design the appropriate width, length and spacing of your crisis garden beds

What I’m doing: 

All of my raised beds (except the mini-greenhouse ones) are standard size; 4 x 8 feet (1.2 m x 2.4 meters), with 20 inches (0.5 meters) of space between them for mowing, walking, and access for wheelbarrows. I just find it extremely useful to have everything this size so I can always use the same calculations per bed for all aspects of growing and just multiply by the number of beds to scale the calculations accurately.

On my parents’ field block, we use 100 centimeters (3 feet) width for the beds of everything except tomatoes, squashes, and potatoes. The beds are relatively short – some 240 cm (7 feet) – and the spacing between them is just a narrow strip you can walk on as there is no need to get anything wild between the beds. We can efficiently work the beds by straddling over them.

Conclusion

All right, so with that, you should have the layout of your crisis garden penciled in. 

In summary, there are three main steps to creating a layout for your crisis garden:

STEP 1. DECIDE WHAT TYPE OF GARDEN BEDS YOU’LL USE —> where you choose the appropriate type of garden beds based on your climate and context.

STEP 2. CHOOSE THE ORIENTATION OF YOUR GARDEN BEDS —> where you choose the appropriate orientation of your garden beds.

STEP 3. DESIGNING THE LAYOUT OF YOUR GARDEN BEDS —> where you first (a) subdivide your growing area into several smaller-sized field blocks of the same size, shape, and length, and then (b) design the appropriate width, length, and spacing of your crisis garden beds.

In my next post, I’ll talk about how to prep your garden beds for planting. I’ll show you a method I use when I’m prepping new beds for planting for the first time, and every time for putting existing beds back to production after a harvest.

See you there!

-William

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