The Moderate Garden

It is traditional to segregate the food-growing area from the ornamental and recreational parts of the garden. The food-growing area itself is organized into vegetable plots, fruit bushes, orchard. greenhouse, and compost heaps. If you opt for the intensive method of growing food, you will essentially be creating a vegetable plot that looks like any other conventional vegetable plot, with neat, regimented rows of crops. Only there is one very important difference: at the soil or micro-level, you will be encouraging as much richness and diversity as possible.

Intensive food production, if it is to be natural and wholesome, relies on careful management of the entire system: composting and maintaining healthy soils using physical, biological, and/or organizational methods (rather than chemical) to deter undesirable plants ("weeds") and animals ("pests"). If you wish to obtain maximum yields from your intensive beds, you must aim to produce "Moderate" conditions.

Moderate, or middling- that is to say, conditions which are not excessively hot or cold, wet or dry, acid or alkaline, exposed, elevated, or sloped, shady or salty ... and in which nutrients are present in ideal quantities and proportions. In other words, perfect conditions for plant growth.

Moderate conditions are what farmers want and strive to create. Gardeners have followed suit, and throughout the ages have striven to file the sharp and distinctive corners off their gardens in order to create the perfect middle ground. This process involves draining, irrigating, cultivating, shading, liming, and fertilizing. However, there are disadvantages, such as attracting pests and weeds, and as a general rule you should only mesify those parts of the garden which you intend to use for intensive food production.

PLANNING YOUR CHOICES AND STRATEGY

Your year of initiation is essential for you to discover what you really want, what you can achieve, and how best to do it. The measurements and observations will guide you as to what works and what doesn't; how much effort, time, and money certain operations take; what looks unacceptably awful. Remember: don't do anything irreversible!

Traditionally, food and herbs are grown in a rectangular plot that is clearly delimited from the rest of the garden and often out of sight from the house. The location is usually open yet sheltered, freely draining, and not in a frost hollow. Gardeners often set aside a plot for perennial fruit crops.

Separating the productive part of the garden from the rest allows you to focus in one place all the special conditions that promote high yields - the intensive approach. But, alternatively, you can distribute productive crops around the garden, mixed in with all the other plants. Raw yields are much lower, but properly chosen and sited, the edibles may, help (and be helped by) other garden plants, and cam their keep by serving other functions, such as shade, ornament, and ground cover. This increasingly popular "integrated approach" can look really good, and suits both large and small gardens.

Locating the productive plot "out of sight" is actually a disadvantage in practical teens. The closer it is to the house, the more exact attention it will receive. Problems are noticed more quickly, harvests are gathered more promptly, and it is easier to finetune the conditions.

In the traditional approach, gardeners dig or even double-dig the main plot annually, and work in fertilizers or manures. They also prepare new plots by digging or double-digging, and bury or physically remove weeds.

They sow or plant crops in straight rows at the beginning of the favourable season, with space between the rows for cultivation and harvesting. As a rule, gardeners arrange these rows in blocks of a single crop variety and weed regularly by hand or by hoeing. At the end of the growing season, they harvest most of their crops and leave the ground bare over the unfavourable season. Finally, they compost any surplus plant material along with kitchen waste.

While digging lightens and aerates the soil, and is appropriate in moderate-to-large plots if you have enough time, it is not essential if the soil is healthy, as the many no-dig systems have shown. In raised and narrow beds the soil is usually uncompacted and weeds can be easily controlled by light surface cultivation. Otherwise weeds can be controlled by mulches or by running the chickens over them in a temporary and moveable enclosure.

You don't necessarily need to remove all the weeds all the time. Some are innocuous, while others are attractive or even useful. Leaving ground bare in the unfavourable season is not a good idea. If there is no other cover, weeds are better than nothing, and they do it for free.

Gardeners grow most crops from specially prepared commercial seed, but there are other possibilities. You can save your own seeds, which already have the advantage of coming from plants that flourished in your conditions. You can also accept self-seeding from certain crops or the seeding of wild edible plants. These are free, hardy, and worth getting used to. You don't need to sow at all if you concentrate on perennial and woody plants, although these usually yield less well or less quickly than do annual cultivars.

A great temptation is to grow far too much of one variety of crop. It is very easy to do, especially as there are so many seeds in a packet and it seems a shame to waste them. This becomes tedious for the consumers of your produce, and resistance sets in. Better to grow small amounts of many varieties-they add interest and they come to harvest at different times.

To keep the costs down, you should arrange seed swaps with friends and neighbours. Traditional gardeners delight in clone-like uniformity of crops, exactly spaced along dead-straight rows. But you can mix different crops in a row, especially if they have different habits and speed of growth (see catch crops, intercrops, and follow-on crops).

APPROPRIATE CHOICE OF CROPS

Most vegetables are annuals or treated as such, while fruits are mostly perennials. There is a traditional repertoire of these in each climate and garden culture, often strongly influenced by European tastes. They arc chosen largely to fit in with the standard diet, and on the basis of received ideas about what is proper to grow in gardens, enlivened by occasional experimentation with new varieties and attempts to carry off prizes at the local show.

Generally speaking, grow the plants that you and your family enjoy eating, not just what does well, looks good, or comes from the traditional repertoire.

Start off by growing the easy plants that do well in your soil and climate. Kale, savoys, broad beans, garlic, leeks, and Jerusalem artichokes are notably easy, while cauliflower, asparagus, aubergines, Brussels sprouts, Chinese leaves, and even peas have a tendency to be unreliable.

Choose plants, such as maize, salads, leaf vegetables, and herbs, where freshness and convenience are paramount. Try to grow crops that displace imported or environmentally damaging products, such as tea or coffee. You could become an expert in particular varieties, or better still, grow rare native cultivars that are in danger of dying out in your locality.

Choose highly productive crops and varieties: those, such as runner beans, that continue to yield if you keep picking them; plants, such as broad beans and kale, which have many edible parts; and "cutand-come-again" crops. Try growing crops and varieties that are either expensive or rarely obtainable, such as white or yellow beetroot, yellow raspberries, kohl rabi, and oriental brassicas. At the same time, don't grow big bland crops that can be bought cheaply, unless you have a big garden and lots of time.

Finally, grow other crops and varieties to meet your needs when vegetables are expensive or unobtainable: for example, the frost-hardy cornsalad, daikon radish, winter onions, and mustard greens. Grow crops that freeze well or can be easily stored, such as root crops, apples, and dried peas and beans.

PLANNING THE PRODUCTIVE PLOT

By the end of your year of initiation, you should have a fairly good idea about what you are going to do. You will know about the patterns of sun and shade, drainage, soil quality, frost pockets, and desire lines. In a new or undeveloped garden you can plan with great freedom; in an established garden you have to work between fixed elements.

At some point in the garden year, you should make a plan of the plot, and what you want to put in it, with details of all the minor fill-in crops as well, and dates when you intend to sow and harvest. Reality never follows the plan for all manner of reasons, but it's still good to have one. You should also prepare.next year's plan to ensure that it dovetails with this year's, and to allow you to obtain the seeds, bring on plants in advance, and so on.

You need to decide where to locate the fixed facilities (shed or store, greenhouse, frames, animal runs, compost, standpipe or waterbutt, storage pond), the permanent plantings (trees, fruit bushes, large perennials), and the intensive beds for annual crops. In a small garden, it matters little where the facilities are placed (but the greenhouse must not be shaded). But taller plants should not shade shorter ones.

The chief ingredients for an intensive plot or a group of narrow beds are: a reasonable amount of sunshine, at least in the main growing season; a site on well-drained ground well away from large trees or at least sunward of the trees and not in a frost pocket. Make sure the plot is not sited on any desire lines, is accessible to wheelbarrows, and is convenient for watering. Once you have fixed the location of the plot, you can choose the appropriate size, form, and method of "breaking in" and apply soil amendments if necessary. You are now ready to decide what and where you want to sow or plant.

CROP ROTATION

You are of course at liberty to scatter mixed seeds at random and see what happens. But it is customary to group plants in blocks or rows oflike kinds, because, different plants like different treatments. And, because each crop type takes different proportions ofnutrients from the soil, and suffers from different soil-borne diseases, it is very good to grow each type in a different place the following year, and again the year after that for at least three years. This is crop rotation (see p.234) and is vital ifyou grow annual crops in intensive beds.

FOLLOW-ON CROPS

Most crops are in the ground for only part of the year. When they are harvested it may not be the right time for the succeeding crop to be planted. The gap is usually filled with a non-rotated crop or perhaps a green manure . For example, a single square foot of a vegetable plot in a northern temperate garden might experience the following four-year sequence: kale (May), celeriac (March), broad beans (November), courgettes (June), green manure (November), dig over (March), lettuces (April), leeks (June), cabbage (March).

These "follow-on" crops are particularly good for providing fresh produce in high-latitude winters when little else will grow. It is a good idea to plan for follow-on crops to go in as soon as you harvest each summer crop. Direct sowings may not have time to germinate and get established, so where possible you should have potted-on plants ready to go in. These include kale, broccoli, savoy cabbage, cornsalad, mizuna, winter spinach, land cress, leeks, garlic, chervil, and kohl-rabi.

CATCH CROPS

As follow-on crops fill a gap after a main-season crop, catch crops fill the short gaps before a main crop is ready. For example, where there is a risk of late frost, French beans or courgettes cannot be put out until late spring or even early summer in northern temperate regions. Savoys or leeks might have overwintered in the same plot, but since you have been eating them steadily, substantial gaps have opened up. These can be filled with fast-growing plants, such as radishes, baby beetroot, rocket, and salads, or by a green manure, such as mustard, which is easily hoed in.

A variation on this catch-crop theme is to sow two different types of seed at the same time - one fast, the other slow. Parsnips are usually sown three seeds at a time, in "stations" a few inches apart, but they take a long time to germinate. Radishes sown between the stations come up quickly and handily mark the row for weeding. They are ready to pull just as the parsnips are putting out their first true leaves.

INTERCROPS

Plants that are destined to be big, but are slow to begin, arc usually planted with wide spacing to allow for eventual growth, but this leaves large areas of ground temporarily unused. These gaps can be filled with small or fast-growing plants that arc harvested before they are crowded out by the principal crop.

Sometimes, these intercrops complement the main crop so well - on account of size or the shape of the root mass, or because they are shade tolerant - that they are simply left in and harvested whenever convenient. This is usually called interplanting, but the distinction is academic. It is by no means essential to cover your plot entirely with edible crops. Flowers and fragrant plants can be slipped in, especially plants that arc alluring to insects; and if any attractive . wildflowers turn up - leave them!

SPACING

When planting, you may often get better overall yields by closer spacing than the instructions advise, even if the individual plants are smaller. Try it - plant some close, some spaced, and observe the results. You can arrange your plants more densely if the rows are closed up and staggered, so that individual plants occupy a cell in a honeycomb. Each plant has its own space, but more can fit into a unit area this way. Such a honeycomb arrangement has the added benefit of giving more effective ground cover, preventing both evaporation of ground water from the soil and
invasion by weed seeds. This isjust as well, because it's more difficult to hoe a honeycomb than regular rows.

HERB GARDENING

Herbs occupy a special place in the garden because virtually anybody can grow them no matter what the conditions. Some herbs are grown principally for tisanes, or herbal Yeas; others, such as sage and rosemary, are medicinal as well as culinary. Many more, such as lemon balm and peppermint, are simply good to dank.

Herbs can do a lot with a little (they are ideal for small spaces) and only by growing them yourself can you get them as fresh or as conveniently. Generally speaking, a family will need, for flavouring purposes, no more than one plant of each of the common culinary herbs.

They can easily be grown in containers - in fact, some of the more rampant herbs, such as horseradish and the mints, need containing to keep them out of mischief. Containers can be an advantage in that, if small enough, they can be moved about to suit the season.

Chervil, for example, loves a sunny spot in the winter, but can be moved into the shade in the summer. Less hardy herbs, such as sage and rosemary, should be brought into a sheltered place in colder weather. From both a culinary and a horticultural point of view, herbs fall into two, or perhaps three, main classes -flavourings, garnishes, and salads.

Most ofthe sunloving, aromatic kinds usually used to flavour cooked food are perennials: sage, rosemary, thyme, tarragon, bay, marjoram, oregano, fennel. They will need permanent places of their own. In areas with severe winters such herbs are better grown in containers, and moved back and forth from sun to shelter.
The softer, fleshy herbs more often used for garnishing are hard to distinguish from highly flavoured plants more commonly regarded as salads. Some are perennials: chives and garlic chives, onion greens, mints, sorrel, and sweet cicely.

Like the Mediterranean herbs, they need permanent homes but with a richer and moister environment.
Borage, burnet, celery leaf, nasturtium, chincsc mustard, coriander, and land cress arc annuals you can scatter among other crops in the main plot, or in an odd corner of the garden. You don't need many of any of these, but you can always do with plenty of parsley, basil, and garlic.

SALADS

Salads form a vital part of the home garden because their freshness is of the essence: pick them just before use at their point of optimum growth, together with their garnishes. They can be worked in among the main items in your plan: many make good catch crops and some, such as land cress, cornsalad, and mizuna, are winter-hardy.

Many are "cut-and-come-again" varieties that can be harvested over a long period without replanting. And don't forget the wild salads, such as bittercress and sheep's sorrel, nor the continental and oriental varieties that Western gardeners are just beginning to discover.

Soil Fertility
If you wish to extract the maximum yields from your intensive plot, you must feed the soil with nutrients. Natural processes of nutrient release are normally too slow for the modern-day gardener, which is why so many are tempted to bypass the natural system altogether, and provide the plants directly with soluble nutrients.. This is the logical basis for chemical fertilizers, in which the role of the soil is simply to provide water and hold the plants upright.

"Negative organics" uses large quantities of bought-in organic materials (dried blood, farmyard manure, fishmeal, etc.) instead of chemicals. This is better in many ways, but has a "robbing Peter to pay Paul" air about it. In the natural garden you should aim to create all necessary fertility from your own resources. But you will increase yields sustainably only if you increase the rate at which nutrients are made available from the soil reservoir.

A sustainable but productive fertility system, therefore, has two aspects. One is short-term: to stimulate the natural processes to make nutrients available to plants. The other is long-term: to top up the reservoir from which nutrients are drawn. Happily, you can do both at once by the regular addition of organic matter'to the soil.

Addition of organic matter is the cornerstone of the intensive approach, and it is hard to overstate its importance. Soil fertility is not just a matter of nutrients, but a complex of chemical, physical, and biological factors: soil texture, composition, structure, pH, and a thriving community of organisms.

It turns out that the addition of organic matter addresses all these factors: it adds nutrients and stimulates the microbial activity that releases more from the soil reservoir; it buffers pH; it creates a stable, open structure that improves drainage and water retention; it lightens heavy soils and firms up light ones. If this seems like magic, perhaps it is. But it is a natural magic within reach of us all, and the basis of organic gardening's most famous slogan: FEED THE SOIL, NOT THE PLANT.

There are three principal methods of adding organic matter to the soil. You can grow it right where you want it in the form of green manures, you can introduce fresh matter from elsewhere, or you can "pre-digest" the organic matter in a compost heap before adding it to the soil.

GREEN MANURES
Plants take nutrients from the soil, but they do a great deal in return. Sugars and other compounds from photosynthesis are exuded from the roots and support vigorous populations of microorganisms. Roots die ' and become food for larger organisms, and the tunnels they leave form channels for water drainage and aeration of the soil. Far from "needing a rest" now and again, soils like having plants growing in them.

So, if at any point in your garden cycle, a patch of bare soil opens up, grow some plants in it. You may then allow such plants to die off naturally, or be killed by frost; or you may kill them by hoeing off the tops; or they may be crowded and shaded out by more vigorous plants around them. In any event they will have done their job and the nutrients they withdrew from the soil will be returned, plus a lot of highenergy carbon compounds, providing food for soil organisms. These plants are called green manures.

Plants grown in between main crops or to fill bare spaces arc called cover crops - they are often lowgrowing and short-lived. More seriously, you can devote part of your rotation cycle to specific plants that feed the soil rather than you. They may be allowed to grow quite large, then are tilled in. Very commonly, they are legumes, which have the power to fix nitrogen from the air, using special bacterial nodules in their roots. Grasses are also frequently used, since their very powerful roots create an ideal crumb structure in the soil.

Not only do cover crops and green manures stimulate soil activity and improve structure, they moderate the soil temperature, suppress weeds, and reduce leaching. They can be sown at most times of the year, in single varieties or mixtures. They are usually dug in before flowering, and it is best to allow a few weeks before planting fresh crops to allow the soil time to digest the material. There are dozens of suitable species; which to choose depends very much on your local circumstances.

NUTRIENTS AND SOIL PH

Nearly all the trace elements in a soil are available to plants if its pH is between 6 and 7. A high proportion Of soils fall within this range and virtually all plants will grow in these conditions. The addition of organic matter, especially well-made compost, tends to "buffer" the acid-alkaline balance of the soil. This keeps the soil from straying outside this pH range, as well as providing a good variety of micronutrients.

So, in most cases, you need not give any special attention to pH, beyond adding organic material. Soils which are very rich in lime may have a pH above 7, but most crops can tolerate this, and it may even be an advantage for some, such as celery, cauliflower, asparagus, beetroot, carrots, onions, leeks, spinach, arid Jerusalem artichokes.

Acid soils are preferred by potatoes, rhubarb, strawberries, cranberries, and huckleberries. Some crops find such soils lack sufficient calcium, so gardeners tend to add lime. However, this raises pH and can be detrimental to the soil community, causing local deficiencies of micronutrients. Preferable sources of calcium can be found in ground limestone (particularly dolomite, which adds magnesium as well), calcified seaweed, crushed eggshells, and wood ash. The latter three are best introduced to the garden via the compost heap. Very alkaline soils can be corrected by adding a handful of gypsum per square metre of soil and then working it in a little way.

FRESH FEEDING
As an alternative to green manures, bring fresh plant material from rlsewherc in yourgarden and either dig it into the soil or leave it as a mulch layer on the surface. You can use kitchen waste, general garden trimmings, lawn mowings, weed tops, or plants specially grown for the purpose. If it looks untidy, or is quickly Oxidized by the sun's heat, spread a layer of inert mulch, such as ground bark, wood chippings, cardboard or polythene sheeting, over the fresh material.

ROCK FLOURS
Finely ground rock, such as basalt, can iuake up for deficiencies in a soil's nucronutricnts. Microorganisms are thought to respond to the influx of micronutrients in the rock powder, or dour, by releasing macronutrients more efficiently. In effect, rock flours mimic the fertility of freshly minted postglacial or volcanic soils.

DYNAMIC ACCUMULATORS
Some plants, such as comfrey, have the quality of concentrating, or making available, specific minerals. You can either dig in these dynamic accumulators or harvest the accumulated nutrients by cutting the leaves and placing them on your intensive plots.

Green manures are usually annuals; perennials would develop far larger root systems and exploit a greater depth of soil, but it would not be convenient to have them in the rotating beds of annual crops. So perennials are sometimes grown separately as a source of fresh material for soil food and valuable soil minerals. Such perennials are rather like artesian wells, drawing nutrients from the subsoil tip into the living zones of the soil, where shallowrooting plants can benefit from them.

THE VIRTUES OF COMFREY
Perhaps the most celebrated of the dynamic accumulators, comfrey deserves a book in its own right. Its roots are very deep; its tissues accumulate potash most strongly, but also nitrogen, calcium, and magnesium. Its vigour allows several cuts a year from each plant.

An easy-to-grow plant, comfrey likes damp, even waterlogged situations, although it will grow perfectly well in any ordinary soil. Unlike most plants it is riot "burned" by very strong doses of concentrated nutrients, such as urine or chicken manure, but consumes them voraciously. Its ability to scavenge nutrients in this way makes it particularly suitable for preventing leaching around compost heaps, septic tanks, and animal enclosures - in fact, the leaves are rich in protein and make very good animal forage.