soil building with weeds

[greenfinger]

I started eating some of my weeds, letting some grow and reseed... I keep them well spaced between my cultivated plants. To help prevent erosion, I encouraged dandelions to edge my unraised beds. I imagined the ground being richer in those areas. Then I found this book, Weeds Guardians of the Soil.
ebookbrowse.com/weeds-guardians-of-the-soil-1980-pdf-d58254125
What do ya'll think?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Fate must be speaking to me. I saw another article today that is likewise extolling the virtues of weeds. How millions of farmers are advancing agriculture for themselves.

Their method very much goes along with how I have been approaching my garden the last few years... Spacing plants further and further apart. My tomatoes this year were planted on a 4 foot by 6 foot grid. That was seemed about right to me. I typically plant other crops like wheat, lettuce, parsnips, etc at a spacing of one foot. Beets are spaced at 6 inches. I've never much been a fan of the crowding that is typically recommended for example in square foot gardening books.

[olddog]

That sounds like an old book, I read years ago, and it had some valid ideas I thought, and made me look at weeds in a whole new light.

[Drahkk]

Jan 19, 2013 23:29:22 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

I've never much been a fan of the crowding that is typically recommended for example in square foot gardening books.

So true. Mel's books have some good ideas. That's where I got the thought of using emt conduit to frame my trellises, and first started thinking about garden layout as a pattern on a grid. But his spacings are far too close. I don't know if he's recommending crowding to keep weeds choked out or if it actually somehow works when you fill your whole garden with his (expensive!) soilless mix, but for me, planting in regular dirt, I get much better production by spacing them out and letting them grow, rather than pruning heavily to keep them from overrunning each other.

MB

[kwilds]

Due to the fact that I have very limited space, I do look for ways to plant close (or grow up tellises) though I wouldn't say I follow the square foot method to the letter. Taking care of the soil is paramount to success when crowding plants and at this point in my life I can only dream of how amazing it would be to be able to keep my soil conditioned like I do for closely spaced planting AND have the room to space stuff out in that soil!

[MikeH]

I'm curious as to why you don't like SFG. Is it from first hand experience? What didn't you like?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I don't like square foot gardening primarily because it doesn't scale up to field sized gardens. Secondarily, I don't like square foot gardening, because it seems wrong to me to crowd plants. While I haven't measured it scientifically, it seems to me that crowded plants produce poorly. In damper climates, it seems that SFG would lead to problems with mildew.

[Drahkk]

Jan 20, 2013 13:19:41 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

I don't like square foot gardening primarily because it doesn't scale up to field sized gardens. Secondarily, I don't like square foot gardening, because it seems wrong to me to crowd plants. While I haven't measured it scientifically, it seems to me that crowded plants produce poorly. In damper climates, it seems that SFG would lead to problems with mildew.

EXACTLY! And for me it is first hand experience.

Like I said, there is some good information and good ideas in the SFG books. And for a small time hobbyist, a beginning gardener, or someone with very limited space, it is a good way to maximize production in the space they have. BUT:

1. Most people with more than one or two small beds will have trouble affording enough peat moss, vermiculite, and compost to fill their entire garden with "Mel's Mix".

2. It is not very feasible for someone with a large garden to hand weed and water every plant.

3. Only 6" of aerated soil plus daily watering causes shallow roots and susceptibility to drought.

4. With the notable exception of leaf lettuces and other salad greens, most plants do produce poorly when crowded. Take corn for example. The original SFG recommends 12" spacing for corn; the "All New" version recommends 6". I've never tried 6" but I did try both 9" and 12". At 9" 150 stalks will only manage about 36 full sized ears, a couple dozen nubby ones and a bunch of unproductive stalks. At 12", 96 stalks net 20 full sized ears. But at 9" in rows with 36" in between rows in a traditional planting, almost every plant makes at least one good ear. That's just one example; I find tomatoes need a minimum 24" spacing (not 12"), peppers at least 18", okra at least 30", strawberries 12", etc.

5. Lastly, in my climate, crowding leads to blight running through my tomatoes and chaonephora fruit rot destroying my summer squash.

I'm not saying that SFG is all bad, just that it does not work for me. But if new gardeners ask for a single book as a go-to reference for practical methods, I'm more likely to recommend Ed Smith's The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.

MB

[MikeH]

The Chinese have been using raised beds and planting intensively for more than a bit of time. Yields look damned good.




This gives a how-to on a largish scale - back40forums.com/index.php?topic=187.msg245#msg245

The attached pdf does it on a massive commercial scale.

Attachments:

[Drahkk]

I think we're on the same side here. I never said raised beds and intensive planting were inherently bad (except perhaps for corn; double rows are about all you can do with it and expect full production), just that many of the spacings recommended by the SFG books are TOO close and that Mel's six inch deep store bought growing mix is impractical. My entire garden has been in raised beds for years, and I'm trying to figure out how to get the tractor and disc to throw up beds so I don't have as much manual soil moving to do on Mr Prince's place. All I'm saying is that the aerated soil depth and plant spacings need to be about twice what SFG recommends. That's why I like Ed Smith's WORD method better. It's a modified version that works better for larger gardens. WORD stands for Wide rows, Organic methods, Raised beds, and Deep soil. Those Chinese pics look a lot more like Ed's pictures than Mel's. I'd never seen it done on that kind of scale before, though. Very eye-opening, but I have to wonder how many man hours go into keeping it that clean?

MB

[mountaindweller]

Doesn't it depend on the climate? In the subtropics (were you grow tomatoes in winter) you want that the plants shade each other.
I always space too tight and the main problem is that things don't get harvested because I can't find them.

[MikeH]

You don't have to use Mel's mix. I think it's there for the person starting out. I think he's trying to keep people away from buying someone else's weeds in a load of topsoil. He's probably also trying to get folks away from the soil amendment dance.

When we were building our raised beds, we went with pure green waste compost. Now we compost in place by filling the bed with whatever plant material we have. Because we never seem to have enough, we're even moving to growing mulch/compost. I agree that there are some things that I don't think that Mel has quite right. Bed depth is one. We ended up with hockey stick carrots the first year. They went down 6 inches and turned sideways when they found the hard clay. So we double dug down and mixed compost into the clay. We've never had a problem with depth since and we never double dig these beds either after the first time. There are certain things that we don't grow in them because it's just not a good use of the space - tomatoes, squash, potatoes. We find them excellent for garlic, radishes. lettuce, bush beans. Also for beets, carrots, turnips, and parsnips but then again we're growing for a root cellar that supports two. We actually sat down and figured out how much we wanted over the winter. Now we grow that amount and never run short or have too much.

We find that weeding in the early stages of growth is very easy. It's a weed if it's not where it's supposed to be. Getting the weeds at the early stage takes the competition away and the vegetables establish really quickly. There's no thinning either which is great because you avoid the problem of pulling up/pinching out more than you want or less than you want. Dense planting means that the soil is shaded and very few weeds develop as a result.

I suspect that this kind of dense planting creates competition for nutrients and only works well if your soil is very rich. Our is and we work to keep it that way by composting in place, ie, we try not to pull up roots. We mulch heavily during the season and we top dress with partially decomposed plant matter in the fall. And we're working on a rotation scheme where we give beds a rest every other year by growing fertility - peas early followed by buckwheat followed by daikon radish that we'll let winter kill and rot down in the soil.

Those Chinese gardens are amazing. There's an old Chinese gentleman in our village who has amazing raised vegetable gardens that look just like those in the picture. I'd love to know how he does it but he doesn't speak any English so I've not been able to chat yet.

[oxbowfarm]

Here's my take. There are basically two systems here and they don't mix well.

System 1. Intensive (Square Foot Gardening like Mel Bartholemew or Biointensive Mini-Farming like John Jeavons/Alan Chadwick/Ecology Action)

System Requirements-

• High Fertility input on growing area (compost and/or fertilizer)
  
• High Water requirement (frequent irrigation)
  
• Usually complex cultivation schedule, double digging, trenching etc. for deep highly porous bed soil macro structure
  
• High Labor requirment, low mechanization (usually)
  

Pros-

• High Yeild per unit area
  
• Rapid soil improvement in growing area
  
• Smaller land area requirment
  
• Weed suppression effects due to tight spacing
  
• Enables complex intercropping
  • Efficient resource utilization
    
  
  
  Cons-
  • High Labor
    
  • High Input cost
    
  • Complex system must be maintained as a whole or it all falls apart
    
  • Difficult, expensive to mechanize
    
  • Difficult to incorporate cover crops into rotations
    
  • Very complex rotation schedules
    
  • Higher disease transmission, esp. fungal
    
  
  
  
  System 2 Extensive (Traditional Row Crop Agriculture, Jethro Tull)
  
  System Requirements-
  • Mechanical Traction, tractor or draft animal power assist.
    
  • Large land area
    
  
  
  Pros-
  • Lower Labor costs
    
  • Easy to mechanize, cultivation, tillage, etc
    
  • Lower inputs per unit area
    
  • East to incorporate cover crops into rotations
    
  • Simpler rotation schedules
    
  • Less prone to total crop failure
    
  • Lower disease transmission, esp fungal
    
  
  
  Cons-
  • Less efficient resource utilization
    
  • Lower yield per unit area.
    
  • Ideal weed environment
    
  • Often deteriorates soil structure over time (OM loss, erosion, nutrient loss, leaching, salt accumulation etc.)
    
  
  
  These are two different systems and they don't really tolerate mixing. You can't plant at intensive spacings and then water and fertilize at extensive rates. I use both systems here. My vegetable crops for market are intensively planted and managed, my homestead crops for our own use are extensively planted and managed. Basically two totally different methods for management.
  
  Intensive agriculture works really well for high value crops on high value land. Extensive agriculture works best for low value crops on low value land. Saying that intensive agriculture doesn't work ignores the evidence of history. Read "Farmers of Forty Centuries". The number one requirement for it to work well is lots of "boots on the ground". If you don't have the labor to maintain the intensively planted crops they will fail on you. I love Square Foot Gardening because it details an entire system for an urban/suburban gardener with little or no land can use to grow a large amount of produce. It is not geared towards anyone but a home gardener and it is meant to be used as an entire system. It is a great place to start for people in that situation because it is simple and accessible and yet covers everything a beginner would need to know to be successful. It doesn't transfer to extensive, large gardens well at all.
  

[Drahkk]

Jan 21, 2013 7:11:04 GMT -5 MikeH said:

There are certain things that we don't grow in them because it's just not a good use of the space - tomatoes, squash, potatoes. We find them excellent for garlic, radishes. lettuce, bush beans. Also for beets, carrots, turnips, and parsnips but then again we're growing for a root cellar that supports two.

I think you just nailed why I'm fussing about spacing. There are always a couple of experiments going on, but my garden always contains tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, sweet potatoes, okra, and melons, none of which are an efficient use of the space. This year I plan to move the tomatoes, okra, and all vining crops to Mr Prince's plot, so maybe I can try something different in the beds.

Jan 21, 2013 7:11:04 GMT -5 MikeH said:

We find that weeding in the early stages of growth is very easy. It's a weed if it's not where it's supposed to be. Getting the weeds at the early stage takes the competition away and the vegetables establish really quickly. There's no thinning either which is great because you avoid the problem of pulling up/pinching out more than you want or less than you want. Dense planting means that the soil is shaded and very few weeds develop as a result.

That's one of the things I love about it as well. If I could find a way to stop nutsedge and Bermudagrass from coming back I'd barely have a weed problem once the main season is in full swing and the ground shaded.

I've got 8 4'x4'x12" beds and 1 24'x4'x12", and I removed the sod and double dug under them when I built them. I was a more naive than you when I first filled them though; I got that load of topsoil, and have been amending ever since to build it up. I've just about gotten to the point where all it needs is plenty of compost, but it took years to do. I'll post some pics once I get the winter weeds cleared out/turned under (ah, vanity!); I've been a little lazy the past couple of months...

MB

[petitvilaincanard]

IMHO the main point about raised beds is the total absence of compactage of the beds.

I think the raised beds could very well be adapted to a degree of mechanisation if the width of the beds is adapted to the trail width of a tractor(and vice versa)

You can design the tools for the tractor for tilling and weeding the beds and for maintaining the beds.

The most essential idea of raised beds is not that the beds are raised but that the paths are fixed.