Let’s talk about one of the more important concepts we’ve found about the overarching design of production focused food gardens. We’re going to talk about the concept of concentric circles.
We borrow this philosophy directly from permaculture. While we, ourselves, are not strict “permaculturalists,” we aren’t shy to use good ideas to help frame our thinking about gardening. Functionally, this concept deals with organizing gardens in orders of proximity, time spent on the crops and general importance to the gardener.
People might wonder how we efficiently garden away from our home and also manage so many gardens. It’s precisely the thinking that goes into these concentric circles that largely makes it possible and more sane for us.
When you think about the ideas of care and feeding of a garden, as well as frequency at which you use the produce, we can develop a strategy about how we develop our gardens. At the center, we have our kitchen, the very place we use our produce.
From the center, very close to our kitchen, we maintain herbs as we want to create flavorful food. We find the close proximity encourages us to use them more. In the next circle, we maintain “high rotation crops” like lettuce, radish and other things that we’re frequently using in our day to day meal preps. These high rotation crops tend to be a bit more needy, too, so the proximity helps.
In the next circle, we might have longer range crops that we’ll still frequently bring into the kitchen like tomatoes, peppers and most full season crops. These are things where we want to use them relatively close to when they are ripe and they also might have semi-frequent harvests. The care of these crops is also important to ensure they continue producing.
At our furthest circle, like our community garden, we’re primarily growing long range crops with a singular harvest point. This allows us to perform semi-regular trips to check on maturity, but not as frequently as the inner circles. Also, the time we have to care for these plants is relatively less as well.
Essentially, the closer circles require more care and regular harvesting. The further out we go, the less care and harvesting that is required. The design doesn’t have to be “exact” circles or anything, it’s more a framework for how to architect multiple gardens and the types of things you should be growing in them.
