When planning a vegetable garden ask yourself how much time you want to spend in it. Unlike perennial gardens, vegetable gardens require constant attention; they need to be weeded, watered, possibly fertilized and certainly harvested. You could have to handle pests and process the harvest as well. The size of the backyard and the number of crops in it dictates how much time you’ll must spend tending it.
Hugelkultur—a type of composting and gardening that seeks to mimic the pure decomposition and soil formation processes found in forests—is an efficient example of this. North Berkeley resident Genie Scott retains a large garden with vegetables, fruit trees and bee hives. She saves seeds from previous years and uses them to sow her plants.
You Can Grow Your Own Exotic Veggies, Superfoods, and More With These $22 Gardening Kits
Hugelkultur is practiced by Sepp Holzer as a technique of forest gardening and agroforestry, and by Geoff Lawton as a way of dryland farming and desert greening. When used as a method of disposing of large volumes of waste wood and woody debris, hugelkultur accomplishes carbon sequestration.
A patch of potatoes grown by a Peruvian peasant or an Irish smallholder for private use might be described as both a backyard or a farm. Hügelkultur is anxious with growing crops on piles of rotting wood, as a type of raised bed gardening and composting in situ. An English loanword from German, it means “mound backyard.” Toby Hemenway, famous permaculture writer and instructor, considers wood … Read More
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