AMERICAN INTENSIVE SOLAR GARDENING

Enlarge Image Image Gallery

GEARING UP FOR THE SPRING GARDEN

When we began homesteading, one of the hardest things we had to do was to change the habits we had developed in our consumer lifestyle. Our question changed from what do we want for dinner to what do we have for dinner. We must confess that, toward the end of our first winter, our enthusiasm waned when the answer continued to be “root crops.” We wanted to develop a gardening system that would enable us to have the food we like—fresh produce available throughout the year. Today, having enough of the kinds of food we really like to eat is a concept that has become thoroughly ingrained in our self-reliant lifestyle. We have gotten into the habit of having what we like—fresh, great-tasting, healthy food—because we now possess the necessary skills and tools to be truly self-reliant.

Intensive Gardening

When we first decided to homestead at the end of the 1960s, Lea's motivation was primarily intellectual, while mine was purely instinctive. I was raised in the country, in a family that grew the bulk of its own foodstuffs. Fate must have smiled on Lea when he bought our property, because almost every bit of it sloped southward, making it ideal for both solar living and gardening. It had been a working farm less than one hundred years before, though by the time we moved there it had long since reverted to forest.

Comparing traditional rows, raised beds, and finally, open beds shows the tremendous space savings and ease of access improvising affords.

Lea cut the large second-growth pine trees that inhabited the site where we decided to locate the garden. A neighbor pulled out the stumps with his back-hoe. By the time he finished, the ground that remained was a mixture of hardpan and rocks, with a pH of 4.5 and no humus or any other suggestion of fertility. We began to build up our soil organically by adding hundreds of pounds of rock minerals and by raking up leaves and topping them with mulch hay to keep them from blowing away.

That first spring of 1970, when it came time to plant, we laid out our garden in traditional rows, since that was all we knew how to do—all except for the potatoes. We decided to plant the potatoes in the way a local friend described. Fairly late in the spring, we cut up five pounds of supermarket potatoes and planted them on top of the soil in a six-by-10-foot area and covered them with rotted mulch hay. As the plants grew, we settled more hay around them. When we harvested in the fall, that little patch yielded 70 pounds of potatoes. We recognized that something special had happened in our potato patch. It was our first intensive bed.

The next year we shaped random, free-form beds and planted vegetables in clusters rather than in rows—a method of planting Lea had observed in France in the 1950s. Then we noticed something strange. We had planted the same amount of vegetables as in the previous year, but in only a little over half the garden space. We began looking for different things to grow, branched out into mangels (sugar beets) for our pigs, and started planning crops of soy and other dried beans and flint corn for the following year. This was our first experience with an intensive gardening system.