You Tube Gardening

[lcertuche]

I've been watching a lot on YouTube like canning, homesteading, and now gardening. So many beautiful gardens. Anyway it's giving me an itch to try to get something in the ground. Has anyone tried the Mittleider Method? I have tried deep layer mulch in the past with letting my chickens in the garden all winter. This worked great. If I could get my garden spot fenced in I would do this again. It was the best garden ever!

 

[digitS']

I did some reading not video watching on this, @lcertuche . It reminds me of Square Foot gardening and French Intensive methods.

When I began being more serious about gardening, French Intensive inspired me but I have always had more square feet than time and other resources. There have been seasons when my gardening has been entirely in beds and I prefer it that way. I once had a lot of box frames in one garden. In time, they have to be replaced. Banging my ankles and shins into them as they began to deteriorate took away my enthusiasm for doing more than just hauling off those old cedar boards and not replacing them.

Depth of cultivation appeals to me but I had to be reasonable. First off, because I have never began a garden on ground where there was more than 8" of topsoil. Also, there is only so much weight that I'm interested in moving at the end of a shovel handle.

Of course, I could bring the growing medium in and dump it on the soil surface but, what kind of investment and equipment will be needed if I am planning on, oh say, a 2,000 square foot garden? How about 20,000 square feet ...

I worked for a number of years in a rose greenhouse bushes left to grow for 7 or 8 years was common. Those 4' beds were deeply cultivated and we added a good amount of cedar sawdust during the process.

It's interesting that the advice we often hear is to not put too much high-carbon material in the ground. That's well founded advice. Nitrogen is an essential plant nutrient and it is tied up in something like sawdust and living plants are deprived of the big N. So, what was happening with all those wheelbarrow loads of sawdust we were moving into the greenhouse soil?

It was cedar and took years to decay. Added nitrogen was available to the plants during that time and "adding" is what we did. Initially, it was ammonium sulphate but every time the water was turned on, plant nutrients were injected into that water. Every time!

Although new glass houses were built over additional ground, the greenhouses had been there over 50 years. The health department and environmental agencies came calling. Sure. The water table was high in that area and ground water had become contaminated. A new well for the property had to be drilled - well away from the greenhouses. The entire local aquifer was contaminated and the owners were lucky that the early regulations were so lax that compliance through most of the 20th century was easy and they dodged out of having to pay for any community-wide remediation ..!

We can grow plants by continuously meeting their nutritional needs. I think "modern agricultural" is almost entirely built on that science. Further, a more "natural" program using manure can be unpleasant, expensive and, also, contaminating.
Either method has to be done carefully. We are also talking about our food here!

What we should all be thinking about is what is originally there and available to us. If your soil is inadequate to begin with, it may be absolutely necessary to make some big changes just to have a garden. Then, we don't want to make trouble for our neighbors or leave things worse than we found them.

Steve

 

[lcertuche]

Last years tiny garden was an underwhelming success (failure) but I did get lots of jalapenos and banana peppers, yellow crookneck squash and eggplant. The tomatoes and onions got ate, as did the kale.

I love the deep mulch method because it worked so well in the past but I spent months mowing leaves and have to throw into the garden. My chickens were up to their chest in mulch but they loved it. By summer the weeds and bugs were a distant memory and it was bird aerated and fertilized. I was constantly running my nephew out of the garden from digging worms for fishing, lol. This year I hope to rig up a fence and I have my chicken litter from the coop. I still need to find a way to get it tilled or somehow mulched. I hope to grow enough this summer for many meals.