This past weekend finally afforded me (Michael) the time, equipment, and chutzpah to get out and prepare our two new garden beds. In keeping with one of the tenants from The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, I have been moving ever closer to creating a landscape in my yard that follows "if I can't eat it, I won't water it." This not only, thankfully, cuts down on my mowing duties, but also affords us the opportunity to experiment with plant placement around the yard. As part of this, I placed the new beds at the head of our driveway and tilled under a few more blades of the invasive devil known as Bermuda grass.
Our original garden plot (the 10 x 17 area that has been feeding us for two years) went in immediately after we bought the house as my first step of rebellion towards being confined to the term "urbanite" merely because of my address. This being the case, however, I had not taken the time to really think through the logistics of the garden construction. Instead, in true Whitley fashion, I grabbed the baddest tool I could find and went to work. It is a great way to vent out some frustration towards "the Man" but wasn't necessarily in the best interest of our long term soil management and garden design. With a single, large, raised bed we ran into the issue of constantly needing to step in/around the bed in order to reach all the plants for sowing, tending, and harvesting. This leads to a sizeable amount of the soil in this bed being regularly trampled and compacted. This led to poor aeration of the soil around the plants and the ever nagging puddles that plagued certain areas of our clay-based soil.
Now that I have had two years of growing in the original plot and have read thousands of blog posts, magazine articles, news casts, and books, I feel marginally more knowledgeable than I did back then. Therefore, Madi and I have decided that over the next couple of years we are going to move towards using 4' x 8' raised beds for all our vegetable gardening at the house. This will obviously start with the newest two beds, and we will be retrofitting the original plot by turning its singular 10 x 17 area into four 4 x 8 beds. For those of you doing the math ... yes, that means that we will be loosing some total square footage. However, I believe that the benefits of having smaller raised beds will outweigh that loss and should even help us be more productive with the land that we will be using. Without having to step into the growing medium, the soil should remain less compacted and therefore require less cultivating/tilling and will be easier for the plants to grow in.
I am hoping in the future to build some arched row covers that will fit the 4x8 beds so that I can completely enclose a bed at a time to create a mini-greenhouse effect on my seedlings to get them started in spring and on my full plants to keep them going later into winter. If I can swing it, I'd also love to build a chicken tractor to house new chicks/pullets that would fit into the 4x8 beds so that I can let our birds do the work of cleaning up the garden waste and "tilling" the soil once the beds are empty come fall. Expect updates on this in particular as the year progresses. Hopefully the chicken tractor will look something like:
With a little more hair on my head, and a much prettier dog at my side
As it is with all farmers and gardeners come spring, I am full of hope and optimism about what the season holds in store for us here at Flip Flop Farms. I have no delusions that everything will go as planned, because honestly I am pretty happy to have my plans change. Some of the greatest things in my life have happened when I thought that my plan was shot all to hell. That is not to say that I will not still make the plans, thanks in a large part to my lovely and hyper-organized wife, but I am excited to see what things will pop up this year and "improve" upon my plans.
We'll see you in the dirt ...
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