Gardening

Digging Deep

Farming and gardening in this part of Central Texas, especially since the effects of climate change have become more pronounced and frequent, require special methods and techniques to assure vegetable production and plant health. I have found that growing in raised beds filled with high quality soil and compost, with the sides and part of the bottom of the beds lined with pond liner and a one inch layer of pine mulch covering the surface to help retain moisture, greatly increases plant growth and production. Raised beds do tend to leach out nutrients faster than in-ground beds so it is necessary to add organic fertilizer, compost, worm castings and other soil enriching elements to the beds on a regular basis to keep the beds fertile and well balanced.

Since we are now expanding our farm production, we have considered several methods for bed building in our expansion areas. We want to keep our operation manageable by two full-time people and only occasional part time assistance, but we want to produce enough volume to sustain ourselves and 20-30 other families. We also want the farm to be completely self-sustainable in the future, including generating our own power from solar and wind systems. With these requirements and aspirations in mind, the method of biodynamic intensive farming emerged as the best fit for our operation. I am just learning about the basics of this method, but I had intuitively been using many of the techniques that are basic to this approach to agriculture; deep raised beds, intensive planting, use of compost, compost crops and cover cropping, companion planting, crop rotation, use of hand tools rather than power tools and a focus on nutritionally dense crops. The market garden raised beds have been developed and installed using this method and have been quite productive.

This asparagus was planted just two weeks ago and is growing wonderfully!

I wish the Beaverlodge Slicer tomatoes would hurry up and ripen. I am dying for fresh tomatoes.

I spent many hours last week working on the preparation of the bed pictured below. This bed had been a great producer in past years, but for the past two years has not had any successful crops growing in it. My assumption was that the addition of compost a couple of times a year had not been adequate to maintain fertility in the soil. So I double-dug the entire bed to a depth of 16 inches, which was as deep as I could go until I hit rock, and worked 40 lbs of worm castings, a generous amount of Ladybug brand all purpose fertilizer, and some Actinovate into the soil to enrich and activate it. Yesterday I planted the bed with eggplants, cherry and plum tomatoes, tomatillos, dill, chamomile, parsley and several types of basil. I am anxious to see if my efforts will produce good results.

We were blessed with a half an inch of rain yesterday. Sure wish we could get a bit more, but glad we haven’t had any severe weather.

It’s spring. Get out and dig!

Update – May 18: I am happy to report that two weeks after the transplants were planted in the double dug raised bed the results have been brilliant! I have been watering the bed very lightly by hand almost every day and all of the plants are thriving. See for yourself below.

Update – June 13: It is now a little more than five weeks since the transplants were set out in this bed and look at them now! We have not had any rainfall since this bed was planted and almost every day has been over 100 F. The bed has drip irrigation installed which is run for about 15 min each day. The eggplants are all producing lovely glossy purple fruit. The cherry and plum tomatoes are producing modest amounts of very tasty fruit and are actually setting new fruit even in this hot dry weather. The basil, dill, parsley and chamomile are growing like weeds. I am letting many of the herbs set blooms to feed our bees and to attract them to the vegetables. This bed has been a total inspiration to me.

© 2011 Lost Valley Gardens.