Hooray! After a month of pig tractoring, fencing and gathering resources, the Milkwood Farm organic market garden has officially begun! Behold the image above, in which is recorded the planting of our very first lettuce.
It was a very eventful day, all in all. First thing in the morning, we had to convince our hire-a-pigs to stop their pig tractoring, get into their trailer, and go home. Neither Milly or Sausy were much interested in this idea. But after two hours of poking, prodding and pleading, the piggies were loaded up and cleared out of the way.
The market garden area, halfway through the pig-tractoring process
Pigs out, and starting to spade up the ground
Then arrived Mike, Joyce and Matthew from Allsun Farm, along with Stephen Couling, our brand new Organic Market Gardener (or OMG, as he is now known around here). Stephen had spent the last three weeks at Allsun Farm, learning a bunch of market gardening skills.
The Allsun crew arrived, had a quick cup of tea, and promptly set to work. Joyce had decided to make up and plant two beds before they left the next day at lunchtime. Right. Looks like we’re straight into it, then!
I’ve never seen these type of beds made before. It’s so simple. And so involved, both at once.
Joyce digging while Nick considers all those straight lines
Next up was marking out the planting spaces. This nifty device was used to regulate the squares so that the greens would be evenly spaced.
Row spacer tool. Slideable teeth allows you to define size of cross-hatched planting squares
And then to planting. After recording the most auspicious first lettuce, I got out of Stephen’s way and let him do his OMG thing.
Stephen planting lettuces with ho-mi
Joyce, Matthew and Stephen busy making beds
And by lunchtime the next day, those two beds were made and planted. Wow. This is so different to the gardening and food growing methodologies that I’ve been involved in. This is serious.
As someone said in a comment on one of these photos on FaceBook “hmm straight lines. are you nervous yet?” And I am, a bit. I’m so used to the no-dig, on contour, heavy mulching approach.
However I am also very excited about approaching this garden in a way that is proven to work, and which will produce a large amount of specific foodstuffs in a timely fashion. This is now necessary for us as we shift to community scale food production, and away from just our little family’s vegie needs.
And it’s for this reason that we’re following an Eliot Coleman (ish) style of intensive organic vegetable production this season, mentored by Allsun Farm. Boots and all.
Realistically, if I was left to my meager devices and just had my no-dig beds this year, I’d be supplying maybe 15-20% of our rather extensive on-farm vegetable needs this season: herbs, greens, a post-Christmas burst of tomatoes, etc.
And I’d be buying the bulk of our vegetable needs for this farm’s season from the shops. Just like everyone else I know.
So while I’m a little unsure about the bare soil, straight lines and all the rest of it, I am also very aware that we have a lot to learn from these types of techniques. Ways of doing that haven been refined over generations to give high vegetable productivity on small plots of land, using organic methods, in an energy efficient manner.
Maybe once we get the hang of confidently supplying 80% of our on-farm vegetable needs, we can start to roll with different techniques, planting combos, bed designs, mulching patterns etc. I don’t know. I haven’t got there yet…
What I’d like to see happen down the track for this garden is for it to be a flourishing space, bordered by polyculture hedgerows, interspersed with flowers and herbs, and pumping out amazing organic food for our farm family, interns, wwoofers and course students.
And if straight lines in the first year are the path that leads us to that place, I’m up for it.
Ashar inspects the lettuce, onions and cima rapa about to be planted...
Un-expressably large thanks to Joyce and Michael of Allsun Farm for leading us all through this process. Big thanks also to Matthew who worked like a trojan while he was here. And welcome, Stephen!
We’re running 2 ‘Starting an Organic Market Garden’ courses with Allsun at Milkwood Farm this season. The first one sold out long ago, but if you like you can snap up a spot on our March 2012 Market Garden course here.
Resources:
- Allsun Farm ‘Growing Annual Vegetables’ CDROM
- Ho-Mi. Awesome korean garden tool.
- The New Organic Grower by Eliot Coleman.
- Allsun Farm’s resources page
- Our combined Milkwood Market Garden blog, a diary of this food-growing process.
Related posts:
- Planning our organic market garden
- Growing Annual Vegetables: CDROM review
- Gravity fed water for Milkwood Farm
It seems a wonderful concept – am following it through and sharing as your fb allows! Thanks
Why are Permies so afraid of straight lines? This notion that they don’t exist in nature is plain wrong – consider an endless set of waves stacking up to break on the shore or a tall eucalypt forest full of bolt-straight trees shooting for the sky. Straight lines might not be as common as informal curves, but they’re definitely there. And you’re right Kirsten, for community scale food production a level of efficiency is important and straight lines help, rather than hinder.
Can’t wait for the workshop!
Quiet often the most direct route is a straight line!
Here’s to the most direct route to achieving your growing goals..
See you in a few weeks.. Can’t wait to become a OMG!
Don’t think permies are afraid of straight lines as such, it’s just that straight lines denote a lack of crenelation, and therefore less opportunity for edge and diversity…
having said that, a straight line is usually just a curve that you cannot comprehend as such. Take the horizon, for example! Here’s to direct routes indeed…
Righto, I see the connection now. Crenelation provides opportunity for greater edge and diversity. Cool. Have to agree too that most “straight” lines are actually big, shallow curves that simply appear straight. Certainly true in my garden, where most things are lsightly wonky becuase they’re laid out by eye, rather than a tape measure.
will be watching along to see how things go. 🙂
I’m really looking forward to watching how this develops going forward. I have a bunch of questions which I don’t mind if you want to cover in a future post. How are you going to maintain/increase fertility? All that exposed soil will be losing a lot of carbon, will you be relying on a major composting system? If so where will the biomass be coming from? I have often been disappointed that many well known permaculturalists only grow a smattering of their own vegetables, I’m very excited to watch how your system develops. Thanks for posting so regularly and for… Read more »
Hi John, just quickly:
Fertililty: maintaining with compost teas and biofertilizers, increasing with green manure crops in winter and compost in spring
Biomass: coming from mostly our farm, with some outside manure inputs until we get our system entirely up to speed
Glad it’s helpful to you! All the best for your quarter acre of bliss 🙂
Awesome and frightening at the same time, straight lines don’t concern me as much as the whole bare soil concept does. It has taken me a while to adjust to the fact that winter in Tasmania can sometimes require bare soil, otherwise your lovely mulch, which is so beneficial in the summertime, becomes slimy and disgusting. Eliot Coleman certainly discusses the concept of undersown green manure crops and this is where I would be looking to go to avoid the negatives of bare soil. We are on a very similar learning curve it seems, our pigs are still tractoring and… Read more »
Now the season is complete do you still recommend the system in place or is Milkwood going to have a different market garden approach next year? My wife and i are on our second year for developing beds and building soil on a permaculture market garden and have strictly used heavy mulch and no till style approach. (1.65) acres…. our biggest hurdle has been small direct seeded crops and green manures such as salad greens, carrots, buckwheat..etc.. with a season under the farm’s belt do you think no till market gardening is achievable? Maybe spader implements instead of tiller.. Thanks… Read more »
Hi Jeff, good question! Well, we’re still learning, but in short we’re pretty happy with it all so far. I am not sure no-till market gardening is achievable for all crops, tho there’s a lot of sophistication that can be learned about intercropping and undercropping which can reduce tillage. In an established system, no-till might be more viable, but we’re still working with a very large seedbank in our new market garden’s soils so we have to manage the weeds somehow. The beds for next year will be spaded but not tilled, so the inputs in this sense will be… Read more »