![]() ![]() The theory looks wonderful when sketched on a pretty plan, but I can see it creating all sorts of shading, overhead watering on many crops leading to fungus diseases, and access problems which 4 “boring” matching rectangular beds avoid. ![]() I can conceive of circumstances where it would work, but I suspect an essential element for it to work well over a long term is a lot more available space than my suggested prototype starting point below. For example, I’ve seen wagon-wheel layouts with a chook house in the middle and a single big sprinkler on the top of it all. ![]() My advocacy of regular rectangular shaped beds for example was arrived at not because I particularly like order and certainly not through any love of symmetry! However, I have found them by far the most adaptable for rotation and variety of crops (both of which are essential), and being able to use a number of tools and infrastructures - see below – all of which make the job a pleasure, rather than a drag. The following is just the summary of my learning to date of the likely easiest “minimum set-up”. That said, I am not asserting that I “know it all” by any stretch what-so-ever! Nor that any other way of arranging your food growing is necessarily inferior. From my own experience, observations of elsewhere, reading, analysing and trialling, I suspect many of these theories are driven more by the particular personalities and paradigms of the author, rather than thorough research and trialling where the primary objective is harvesting the maximum amount of usable produce while minimizing the amount of effort resource and inputs needed to grow it, and enhancing rather than degrading the ecosystem in the process. They range at one extreme from a jumbled wild perhaps romantic paradise, all self-sowing utopia where weeds are loved as much as harvestable crops, through organic shapes with key-hole beds for good “energy”, to anally-retentive elaborate versions of formal French potagers at the other. Your best layout and set-up will quite probably need to involve some compromises.įinally, before we launch into specifics, there are many theories as to how best to lay out the garden and assemble plantings within. They should also be read and considered “as a whole”, that is, everything should be considered in your particular situation. So the tips I lay out here should be read with this critical fact in mind. However, the early experiences of simply applying other people’s prescribed formulas in my own garden, and lessons learnt from others lead to the following tips about location, layout, set-up, and helpful other infrastructure.Īs with just about everything in life, as Jan Smuts observed, there are broad patterns that can be useful in planning a successful food garden, but every individual situation is truly unique in its details at least, and these are just as important as the broader patterns if you are to have a successful food garden. There are many authors with books and websites on growing vegetables, fruit and herbs so I won’t go into that here. ![]()
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