Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth Read Online Free PDF

Each pair of beds had a 2′ mulched path between the beds and was surrounded by a 4′ grass path. The idea, which I had read about in a magazine article, was to allow space for a garden cart along each bed for bringing in mulch. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I only needed 18″ between the beds and that if I wanted to bring leaves in for mulch, it could be easily managed from the short sides. I also discovered I’m more comfortable working in a 4′ wide bed than a 5′ one. I took out those wide grass paths, making room for more beds, and made the paths between the beds 18″. The new plan increased my growing area within the same space and decreased the area needed to be maintained as paths.
    Wire grass, a type of Bermuda grass, is a problem in my area anywhere there is grass, and my garden is no exception. It shows up whetherwe want it to or not, spreading by both rhizomes and stolons. Limiting the grass along the bed edges limits the threat of wire grass creeping in. Often, people want to surround their beds with wood boxes. That’s not something I recommend, unless you have a really good reason. Doing it because that’s how you think you start a garden is not a good reason. Doing it to exclude wire grass is an even worse reason. If you have wire grass, a box around your beds is not going to keep it out. In fact, it prolongs the problem because parts of the plant will sit right under the edge of the box to keep coming back. The same goes for other barriers you might spend time and money on. Having narrow, well maintained paths leaves no place for the wire grass to grow.
    Don’t hesitate to make changes if you find things don’t work as well as you originally planned. A bed length of 20′ works well for me and fits my space nicely. When I was selling vegetables, I had an additional garden with beds 4′ × 75′. A market grower friend of mine had beds 4′ × 200′.
    Plan Outside the Box
    You don’t have to stick with rectangles for your garden beds. My smaller garden began with rows of 4′ wide beds in 1984. The next year I redesigned it, imagining it would be filled with flowers and herbs and look nice when we pulled in the driveway. I had started the larger garden for my main vegetable production. The new design for the small garden, which I found in a book, was not practical for me. That redesign might have been nice if I had more time to work with it, but our fourth child was born the following year. With a busy family life, I was doing well just to keep up with vegetable production in the larger garden. Just because it is in a book, doesn’t mean it will work for you. That goes for this book also. What I want to do here is to teach you to think. Yes, by all means, try my ideas and see if they work for you. If not, maybe just a little tweaking is all you need, but you need a starting point: a frame of reference.
    A few more years went by and eventually we needed to have more driveway space to allow for parking and turning around. The road we live on had become too busy to back out into safely. I enrolled in a landscape design class being taught at the local high school to help with this planning. Mapping out the area on graph paper helped me decide that the place to add the new parking area was beside the small garden and would interfere with the garden path that went through the middle. When I moved the path over a few feet, everything changed. I put in a curved path that took me from the backyard to the barnyard. From there, other paths fell into place, for a time (see Figure 2.4 ). Every few years I find some reason or other to make changes in that garden, but that backyard-to-barnyard path stays put. If you have a path in your yard, put a garden around it. Decide where you would naturally be walking with a purpose and plan your beds around that.

    Figure 2.4. Garden Map 1992

    Figure 2.5. Garden Map 2009
    That garden has always had some areas