Intensive Organic Gardening - How to Double Food Production in Your Garden

Here's a simple idea to increase dramatically the planting size of your organic garden. It helps you raise many more vegetables the natural gardening way, along with small fruits and salad plants for less effort: Introducing an organic Lazy Barrow - with handles!

Create a pile some four foot across by five foot long as well as four foot deep of any woody, slow-rotting matter. Twigs, little branches, ancient logs, sunchoke stems, raspberry canes, sawdust, the roots of woody plants... whatever comes to hand.

The ground dimensions are not significant, as long as you build the barrow as high as is practical. Interlay the fibrous materials each and every few inches using rough soil, and plenty of fresh manure if you have it. Shape the surface of the pile using the best soil into a big wall with slanted sides and a flat top.

If you look at the sides and top area of this barrow you'll see that they amount to almost twice the planting area of the bottom.

It is a good idea to hold the soil in place utilizing slabs sliced from a lawn (turves) and turned over. You might slice these turves from any meadow. They'll hold the barrow in immaculate form and rapidly rot down into excellent compost. Failing which, hessian sacking, burlap, woollen carpets, old clothes, fishing mesh or thick fabrics might be staked around the flanks to prevent soil erosion. We could still push plants into gaps sliced within the shroud.

We have your own 'Wayland's Smithy'

You now have a model of the famous Wayland's Smithy, that extended tumulus on England's ancient Ridgeway that was the burial crypt of tribal warriors. You might grow virtually anything in the flanks of this tumulus. Big plants that sink very deep roots might be set at the apex. The roots will find all the depth they need without fear of being impeded by hardpan below.

A lazy idea for organic vegetable growing

As you create the barrow, insert into it many strong upright staves so they protrude at least one foot above the surface. The gardener will find these valuable later for support as they reach forward to pluck edible plants from the apex of the barrow without pressing and compressing the earth. Gardeners in the 19th century built vertical strawberry beds as much as six foot high by means of this plan. However, they raised ziggurats: a complex system of steps of diminishing area, on top of the other with each one comprising a separate raised bed.

We now have a Very Lazy Pyramid

We could readily refine a Lazy Barrow into a Lazy Pyramid on the Aztec model. You simply make the barrow into a pyramid. At its base are your toughest degradable things, after which come further layers of quickly rotting woody waste. Cover the slanted sides with slabs cut from a lawn to stop rain washing away the soil.

Pyramids have no benefit over Lazy Barrows, however pyramids will provoke archeologists in time to come with evidence that a land bridge was once in place between your own garden plus the Aztec empire.

A Lazy Barrow can be the perfect strategy for intensive organic gardening. It can yield you as much as double the harvesting potential of its base dimensions. We might raise plants requiring bright sun or space for deep roots at the apex or on the southern as well as western slopes, in the manner of a herb spiral. Plants that like shade such as brassica may be grown about the darker northern and eastern flanks and thirsty vegetables like celery and cress might be set around the perimeter where they can enjoy the run-off of rainfall.

How to turn wood waste into valuable compost

Another benefit of the Lazy Barrow is that it disposes of otherwise long-persistent shrubby waste. Following three or four years, you can level the mound and at its centre should be well-rotted compost, fit to grow potatoes or other sturdy vegetables. So if we must get rid of large volumes of briars and dead wood, and you aren't able to shred them, build Lazy Barrows - and harvest food from them!


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Dr John Yeoman PhD is chairman of the center for natural gardening ideas, the Gardening Guild. Discover hundreds of ingenious plans to grow more food in your garden with less money and work in his practical book Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success. Get it for free at:
http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy