Hopefully you’ve been encouraged to start a Victory Garden during these uncertain times! If you haven’t seen our previous posts, make sure to check out Start A Victory Garden and Starting Seeds for your Victory Garden.
Now that you have your little plants growing and have hardened them off to the elements, you have to get the babies into the ground!
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Decide on how you are going to garden.
Permaculture. The art, science, and often misunderstood style of gardening in which one decides to steward the land by coaxing and encouraging life with biodiversity, mimicking natural habitats, and limiting waste as much as possible.
Back to Eden
We practice a style of Permaculture gardening called Back to Eden. It’s a process of building soil onto of the existing ground. Not tilling is super important to this style of gardening, as you don’t want to disrupt the beneficial fungi and bacteria that occur naturally. (Watch the full documentary on YouTube for free, here!) Also check out our previous post on Back to Eden!
It is best to start a Back to Eden garden in the fall, so the many layers you create can start to decompose and release nutrients over the winter. Don’t lose heart if you don’t have a current garden plot! You definitely can start a BTE style garden now! You may need to supplement periodically with fertilizer, blood meal, or cold manure throughout the season. (Cold manure is a manure you can place directly onto the garden without letting it rest. An example of cold manure would be goat, rabbit, and sheep droppings. Hot manure is so high in nitrogen, it will burn the plants. Hot manure examples include chicken doo-doo, cow, and horse).
Back to Eden is a fabulous method for gardening. I can’t sing it’s praises. The wood chips break down and add nutrients to the soil overtime, they regulate the temperature of the soil, retain moisture when it’s dry but wick away excess water, encourage mycelium growth (beneficial fungi), and help tremendously with weed management.
The downfalls are the time it takes initially to install your garden, extra supplementing the first year or two as the wood chips begin breaking down, and sourcing carbon material can be difficult depending on your location.
Raised Beds
Raised beds allow more direct control when starting a garden. A raised bed is good for those with poor quality soil if you don’t have the time to invest into a Back to Eden Garden right now.
There are huge margins for success with raised beds. I don’t have much experience with raised beds, as I utilize a large amount of ground for the amount of food we grow.
Ideally, you want to fill your beds with a layer of old, untreated wood (that will break down overtime, feed beneficial insects, and help cut the cost of filling your beds with a large amount of soil and compost). A layer of good soil, and topping off with well aged manure (or a cold manure). After your plants or seeds have been put in, you can mulch heavily around them to help with weed management.
Beds made out of cedar, galvanized steel, or large pots will provide you with growing space! The sky is the limit with these! I’ve seen some beautiful homemade options, too!
*If you are using wood, avoid treated lumber. Cedar is rot resistant and will last for a long time!*
They do tend to dry out more frequently, so you may need to water more often than an in-ground back to Eden bed.
Chicken Garden
Allowing your chickens to prepare your garden bed is an awesome technique that is low input for you. Your chickens stay in a set area for 2-3 weeks. They will eat the grass, weeds, and bugs in the area. Their scratching for bugs will help lightly till the soil (without damaging the soil microbes) and fertilize the soil with their droppings.
A chicken tractor such as this can provide your chickens with an enclosed area to work the soil, and you can simply move the entire unit down to expand the bed once that soil has been prepped. This run provides a 56″x31″ area for the hens to forage on. By moving to fresh grass you can provide them with healthly forage area and YOU with healthy soil to work with!
If you’re moving your chickens regularly, I would be comfortable fitting 4 silkie or other bantam breed of chickens in this style of coop.
Pick a location for your garden.
You want to find an area that gets good sunlight throughout the day. If you are in a heavily wooded area, you may want to consider thinning trees or branches to allow several hours of sunlight throughout the day. Those of you who do not have access to good sunlight may want to consider limiting your garden crops to shade tolerant plants (lettuce, spinach, kale, carrots, beets, and turnips).
Keep in mind the water shed around your home. You don’t want to be hauling hose a half acre away from your home to water your garden if it’s in an area that doesn’t retain water well. Conversely, if you choose a low lying area, you may be flooded out of the plot.
Extras
Some other items to have on hand that will make your planting experience easier include:
- Watering can (make sure you water your seedlings well when you plant them.
- Row covers (Row covers are a great, inexpensive way to cover your early or late season crops. They add about 4 degrees of ambient temperature to your plants. They also double as a protective layer from harmful insects. They are great for keeping cabbage worms off your brassica plants. If you use them with plants than need pollinated, you will have to remove the covers during the day to allow for pollination.)
- Sheets will also work well for frost protection (but won’t let UV light through, so you will need to remove every morning).
- Tools for planting and weeding. This kit is amazing. It has some good quality hand tools, AND my favorite weeder! (It digs, slices, cuts, and can saw.)