Well, we are broken, battered and hurting. But, garden number two is prepped and ready to rock! This is always a major milestone for our efforts, being our largest garden.
In ground gardens are no joke, especially when they approach two thousand square feet! This garden is the bread and butter of our preservation focused food production. It’s a lot of space, designed and tested to produce a considerable amount of food!
This is our community garden, located at Fairbanks Community Garden. This is our tenth season here! While it’s challenging to have a “remote garden,” we’ve learned how to really work it and it is a tremendous resource for our efforts!
Our prep work starts with clearing out last year’s detritus. Again, the winter kill makes this effort immensely easier. We like a clean slate, so we also trim out any early season weeds and knock back any overgrowth from the forest next door.
Then, the real work begins. We rotate these beds every season. For each individual bed, we rake in our previous season’s organics, which aids in nutrition and soil drainage. We then add in at least a few cubic feet of compost to each bed, setting up long term and complex nutrition. We’ll then till in each bed, typically hitting the top 4-6 inches of soil.
We use high quality weed fabric as a mulch on each of these beds, helping us to manage native grasses and weeds in a much more sane way. It also helps us retain heat and moisture. We have both “single row” and “double row” weed fabric, alternated to produce cucurbits and brassicas or other plants. We rotate our beds by simply moving the weed fabric down one row each season, effectively rotating our production in each bed with each season.
You should note that we protect our beds, but manage our walkways between the beds throughout the season. Remember, weeds affect plants much more than they do humans! Plus, by the end of the season, this entire space will be entirely overgrown with plants!
You’ll observe that at this garden, we utilize what we call “wide raised rows,” or roughly three foot beds that have sit about a foot above the ground. This provides us with all the soil warming benefits of raised beds, just without the expense of actual raised beds. We grow “large plants” here and while we do have somewhat wide 24 inch spacing, it still allows us to produce very intensively.
We’ll have more to say about this garden in coming days, weeks and months. But, right now, my arms and fingers are throbbing and I’m ready for a stiff shot of Bourbon. So, I’m going to tend to myself right now and try to pretend today didn’t happen.
