Welcome to LinderCroft's Garden

The garden is a magical place for me. It's a place that we see life renew itself. It's an enjoyable labor of working the soil and tending plants. It's a place to grow food to feed yourself and your family that lasts through the year until the next harvest season arrives. It's a place that gives hope of survival and things to come.

Welcome to the garden!

I'm really just beginning this journey. This is a picture taken 05-26-09. The garden is 800 square feet, with eight 100 square foot beds, each being 4'x25'. Eventually I would like to expand this to a space again this size. This would give us sixteen 100 square foot beds or 1,600 square feet of growing space. Of course there will eventually be more growing space than this because I want to grow grain and fodder for the animals. This will mean utilizing part of the pasture to grow grain and hay. But those ideas belong in another page.

My garden beds are planted mostly in equilateral spacing and I don't walk in my beds. More plants can go into a triangular spacing than can go into spacing that are in rows the same distance between rows and plants. Triangular spacing, I feel, is a much better use of the space.

I've done a lot of studying about deep bed, biointensive growing practices. I still have lots to learn, but I am making progress. For the next few years I'll be putting lots of compost on these beds and eventually the soil should hold moisture and not form a crust so readily. I will also be putting amendments on the beds which consists of dolomite (calcium/magnesium), copper sulfate, kelp, gypsum, and sulfur. No phosphates will be used. I also don't use pesticides or herbicides on the homestead anywhere. 

In spring of 2010, I plan to enclose four of the eight garden beds with cinder blocks. This will help define the space better, keep the soil where I want it, and keep feet out of where I don't want them. I have the blocks for the first four beds. Then hopefully the following winter/spring I will manager to get the other four beds done.

I am also toying with the idea of making these into a raised bed gardening system that will accommodate accessories such as cold frames, sunshades, trellis, fence panels for compost, and a chicken/rabbit tractor. Of course, those ideas are all plans for the future.

In planning this, I have to include a rotation system. It's important to rotate the crops to help prevent disease and to not deplete the soil. The other thing I want to be sure to do is grow and make as much compost as I can to replenish the soil without buying compost. The goats, and eventually chickens and rabbits, will provide an abundance of fertilizer for the garden.

John Seymour in his writings advocate the four course rotation. This is a very, very old idea and one that still has lots of merit today. He calls it the ecologically sound farm... the basics were:

1^st  year: One year pasture, grass and clover mix

2^nd year: Root field included turnips, Swedes (rutabagas), potatoes, mangels (cattle beet) and kale

3^rd  year: Winter cereal field which included wheat, beans, and barley

4^th  year: Spring cereal field, usually wheat with grass and clover under-sown

 

We would not want to live on bread, beef and beer of the eighteenth century. Not only for health, but for taste as well, we will want more dairy products: butter, cheese and milk, more vegetables, and a greater variety of food. But as Seymour says, this is still an ecologically sound system. The system can still be managed with our modern way of eating. In a garden setting it could be something like this making it a five year rotation instead of four:

 

1^st  year: Potatoes

2^nd year: Peas/Beans

3^rd  year: Brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, kale, etc...)

4^th  year: Miscellaneous crops - plants that don't fit well someplace else

5^th  year: Root crops

 

This is the objective that I have worked with. However, I need a longer rotation simply because I want to utilize the space a bit differently and I want more of some things. This is more like what I want to try:

 

1^st  year: Chickens/Rabbit tractor (winter)

1^st  year: Corn (spring)

2^nd year: Potatoes

3^rd  year: Chickens/Rabbits, (spring)

4^th  year: Legumes

5^th  year: Brassica’s: cabbage, broccoli, kale, etc

6^th  year: Misc: tomatoes, lettuce, etc

7^th  year: Roots: radishes, carrots, turnips, beets, parsnips, etc

8^th  year: Compost

9^th  year... starts all over again.

 

This all means that any one bed will not grow the same crop again for 8 years... so by the time the corn is back in 1^st place, 8 years would have past. In the meantime the chicken tractor and compost is moving through the beds fertilizing them as they go. I haven't totally decided on how often I will move the tractor. However, I am thinking once in the spring and once in the fall. Therefore it will be on one bed (probably the bed the corn will be planted in the spring) all winter then in the spring move to a bed that won't be planted that year, but keeping it in rotation so that the potatoes are planted in that bed the following spring.

 

Eventually, I would like to get two crops of corn and two crops of potatoes in the same bed in the same year. This can only be done if I plant early varieties of both, get them in the ground early and get then harvested and replanted in time for them to make a new crop to harvest before frost.

 

One example of the principle that Seymour advocates is to manure the potato bed heavily before planting potatoes, then liming the soil before planting peas and beans (legumes). By the 4th year the root crops will be sown when the manure (chickens rabbits) that was in the potato bed has mellowed, or is no longer having a direct influence on the soil.

 

That is much my goal and I believe with diligent effort, I can produce all our real food, minus spices and luxuries, on our own small piece of earth...