History of our Garden: Back to Eden

This is the third part of our garden’s history. If you haven’t checked out the first two posts you can find them both here (Beginning) and (Progress).

After watching the Back to Eden documentary we decided to do some further research into permaculture practices. Bryce watched countless videos on permaculture design and I took a free online course offered by Verge Permaculture. Before the end of that garden year, we had decided to make drastic changes. The old beds were abandoned and we began bringing in loads of aged wood chips from a neighboring town’s compost and yard waste site.

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The New Plan

We knew the location of our garden definitely needed to change. Firstly because of it’s proximity to the neighboring field and it’s over spray. Secondly to bring it closer to our home. With a permaculture design, it’s easiest to break your property down into functional zones.

0 – Your home

1 – Main gardening area that needs daily, constant attention. (Think your kitchen garden, herb garden, etc.)

2 – Areas that need daily maintenance , but not constant attention. This is generally where your chickens, meat birds, rabbits, etc.

3 – Long seasoned crops and grazing animals. If you were keeping cows or goats that can forage or graze on their own.

4 – Native food resources. (For us, this is our acorn, walnuts, chestnuts, butternuts, wild berries, etc.)

Another consideration for our location was having the ability to use passive irrigation and water from rain collection (if watering was ever actually needed.) We have hot, dry months that paired with the hard ground made irrigating in the past absolutely necessary. It is so critical to study your property for it’s watershed and find out where water drains quickly, where it collects, and where it goes after wards before doing anything permanent to your land.

We knew we wanted to keep the main garden and the animals in the back yard (roughly 2 acres) but the majority of the land directly behind our house (and farther away from the sprayed fields) was uneven, sloping, and the water collected deep into the woods in a swampy area.

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Our Water Solution?

Creating small swales on contour with the land.

We created small ditches to capture the water and slowly allow it to drain farther down the slope while watering the garden beds that were down hill from them. At the base, bordering the tree line, we added a small retention pond to capture excess water and hold it in one spot for a longer period of time.

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Creating the New Beds

When creating a Back to Eden bed, you want to focus on layering. You are trying to mimic the creation of topsoil in nature, but speed it up for your benefit. There are many different thoughts on how to go about this, but from speaking with Paul directly, and others who have done BTE for years, this is what I would recommend.

1. Test your existing soil. Find out what you’re majorly lacking and add in any extra amendments you may need.
2. Add a layer of aged manure or compost from a trusted site.
3. Cover with either cardboard or a thick layer of newspaper to dampen out any existing weed and grass growth.
4. Cover with 8-12″ of wood chips (Unsprayed hay, unsprayed grass clippings, shredded leaves, etc.) Paul says in the documentary to use what you have available to you.)
5. If you’re able to, add a topdressing of a cold manure and let the bed sit over winter.

There are many other ways to do this, steps to skip, combine, or do differently but this is what we did. We began raising meat rabbits in the spring of 2018 mostly for their cold manure that can be placed directly on top of the garden.

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2018

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I began adding extra small beds in early spring of 2018 (Let’s be real, it was probably early March and I was out there expanding away!) With little patches for pollinators and cut flowers. Shortly after, we decided to put an herb garden in our front yard. (While I do love the esthetics it adds to our front yard, it’s totally out of range of our normal “zones” so even though I love cooking with fresh herbs, it’s kind of a hassle to gather produce from the back garden, and go all the way around front to get fresh herbs.

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I went a little crazy adding perennials that year. But having learned from my mistakes in the past, I knew that they would take much longer to bear fruit, but would then provide for us for many years to come. We added papaw, American chestnut, butternut, four apple varieties, four persimmons, sour cherry, raspberries, grapes, aronia berries, June-bearing strawberries, goji berries and comfrey.

I noticed in the areas where we applied more wood chips, it was starting to get easier to work with. I still had to enlist Bryce’s help to plant trees and berry bushes, but he was able to use a shovel to dig wholes. Every year prior, no matter where on our property we tried planting, trees or deeper holes REQUIRED the tractor’s aid to break up the soil.

2019

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This past year we focused heavily on perennials again adding hazelnut, more varieties of blackberries and raspberries, Japanese hasps, black currants, asparagus, rhubarb, American cranberry, elderberries, overbearing strawberries, and horseradish. We also thought it would be wise to add a living border to the back property line with layered trees to act as a wind break.

While this second year of BTE definitely had it’s own challenges, I never once felt overwhelmed with weeds (even after going on vacation for over a week). When we returned, it was simply overrun with produce! The soil is starting to turn dark brown, is always moist, and I can easily dig by myself now to plant trees or berries.