Setting out the garden beds
In December 2021 I graduated from the Urbavore Urban Micro Farming workshop – I wrote a blog about it here. Or you can visit their website here.
Joe & Jo Tabone turned their suburban block into a market garden and share their skills on intensive farming. I have followed their guidelines on how to lay out the garden beds and will be utilising other tips of theirs too, relating to plant spacing, propagating and seed raising. More of that in the future.
The beds have to be accessible – 80 cm wide growing beds mean that you can step over them if you need to and you don’t have to break your back leaning into the middle. The paths in between can be as wide as you like. Assess your needs, foot access, wheelbarrows, lawn mowers, traactors require different path widths. I’m just going to be walking along in between mine, and I want maximum growing space, so thin paths are the ticket. Just a shovel width, which is handy for easy path cleaning. When I get going I might fill the paths with wood chip as this is great for limiting the amount of sloppy mud after rain.
I started out by using bamboo canes to get a rough idea of how many beds of these measurements would fit. Then to make this a tad more permanent, tent pegs and builders string. After a couple of minutes I had knocked two tent pegs loose, and so went all out and put in hardwood stakes.
Now, our garden is all angles, levels and natural unevenness. I can envisage a future where I will have insect netting keeping white butterflies off my cauliflowers, and to keep this straight forward the enclosures will have to be rectangle. This will leave triangle shaped garden bed spaces at the ends of the planting rows where they meet the paths. I intend to plant flowers and herbs to attract some biodiversity and pollinators in these triangles. The non-veggie plants are key to what is called Integrated Pest Management. Design your patch to provide alternative food sources for predator insects that feast on the veggie destroying pest insects. No need for chemicals. Another fantastic Integrated Pest Management tactic is a pond or water source close by – which I have already! I’m sure pest management will be a topic my future self will be highly sensitive to and want to write about.
Having marked out the beds, you can get on with soil creation. If you watched the video in my last post you will know I’m already into that, but I’ll go into the detail in the next instalment….
