Part 2 - the start of our food forest and no dig garden

Photo from last year when I was preparing a sallad and couldnt help myself and just had to play with the food ;) Basil, peas and sweetie tomatoes from our garden. It was so great to be able to go out and pick whatever was needed (from what we had) for sallads and it was so tasty.

Last year our landlord tilled the garden before we put stuff in it. We raked the soil into rows (like how we always done it when I grew up) and then we planted stuff.

This is what it looked like in the beginning of August. We had all kind of things growing, some things worked better than others. But since then I read up on the no dig garden (or lasagna gardening) and food forest. By implementing these two we will be able to grow more things on a larger area. Let me explain how :)

No dig garden

Fall is usually the time to put down the foundation for this type of garden - during winter things decompose and you will have that nutritious soil that your plants will love in the spring. But, last fall we had no idea we were doing a no dig garden so nothing was done. So, this means we have to do this in steps (because of the crops we decided to put here). This year we will rake the soil into beds and add wood chips on the pathways inbetween. When you walk on soil you pack it down, you want to avoid this happening where you plant your plants. So, we will make the beds so that we can reach to pick whatevers growing without having to disturb the soil. The wood chips on the pathways will surpress weeds and retain moisture (and over time decompose into soil).

Here is a real good in depth article about it : https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/diy-instructions/no-dig-gardening/
And a shorter one (but I really liked the second picture in this one): https://www.charlesdowding.co.uk/no-dig-growing/why-no-dig/

This is our preliminary layout for the garden. There is two asparagus patches (our landlord said they were planted when she was 7 and she is in her 60s now) so we will leave them as they are. We are placing most of the rows east-west with the tallest crops in the north. I say preliminary because

this is what the garden currently looks like. When the snow is gone we will calculate how many beds and how wide they will be and so on. We are planning on having our potatoes and carrots here. In the beds where the potatoes will grow we will put straw on top of the raked beds as a mulch. In the fall we will let the stalks of the potatoes lay and they will decompose with the straw over winter. The beds for the carrots we will leave as they are (perhaps mix some other type of soil into it to give it a lighter texture) because we dont have compost thats a year old.

"Mixing fully composted material in will help to loosen the soil, but avoid using fresh manure as the high levels of nitrogen will produce leggy, poor tasting carrots"

But we might add straw as a mulch for them as well. The trouble we had last year was that the soil is very compact and has a clay texture, when we watered the surface was too hard to break through for some plants. The carrots we finally got grew on top of the soil rather than down. (picture on the left is one of our carrots from the rainbow mix crawling out of the ground.) The straw mulch will keep it moist and hopefully prevent it from turning rock hard.

So, our potatoes and carrots will be in the no dig garden. For those of you who read the previous article saw the layout of our land (https://steemit.com/homesteading/@elfmyselfandi/slow-down-and-really-see-your-land) we will have our kitchen garden right outside our door. We have a porch with 8" wide "flower beds" that we will use for edible things. Brock got hold of a load of free wood chips that we will use for ground cover for the fenced tree lines and create a small scale food forest. (read about the different layers of the food forest here: http://tcpermaculture.com/site/2013/05/27/nine-layers-of-the-edible-forest-garden/)

In nr 7 we will grow different types of squash as the ground cover, peas and painted ladies beans by each tree as the vertical/climer layer. We have a bit of a mole or gopher problem around there, most likely a mole, so we are a bit cautious about planting a root layer there (beets etc). On the west side of nr 7 we will place our tomatoes along the fence, they will have sun basically the entire day and because the land slopes towards the fence there whatever rain that falls will run off and gather there.
In nr 6 we are thinking of having broad beans and brussel sprouts on the east side of the tree line, then broccoli, couliflower - plants that doesnt want it too hot (because we have bushes on the west side they will have enough shade.
We will plant corn and sunflowers all along nr 8. on the east side (sunflowers for chicken feed and corn for them and us both).
Hm, thats is about as far as we have gotten now. We will add more layers in all those areas. Nr11. the patch of forest will be our start up area for a proper food forest. But I will talk more about this all of these plans in the next part. :)