Mother's Minigardens

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From Mother No. 92

Double-dug or rototilled bed? Straight rows or deep mulch? Which of these gardening methods is best?

By Walker Abel

Two summers ago, in 1984, our Eco-Village gardeners conducted an intriguing experiment: They grew the same vegetables (and identical numbers of each) using four different methods. The techniques they used in four minigardens were these:

BFI: the hand-worked, biodynamic/French intensive technique, in which the soil is first loosened to a depth of two feet with a spade and fork and then shaped into a four-foot-wide raised bed.

RB: the rototilled, raised-bed method, in which the entire area is rototilled and the loosened pathway soil spaded and raked up onto a four-foot-wide raised bed (then treated like the standard hand-dug biodynamic/French intensive garden).

CR: a conventional row design, in which the entire plot is rototilled, then planted in single rows with pathways in between.

DM: the deep-mulch technique, as popularized by Ruth Stout, in which the entire growing area is continuously covered with a generous layer of organic mulch. (To plant in such a garden, the mulch on top is temporarily brushed aside and the seeds or seedlings put into the lower, and more completely decomposed, layer.)

The results of this fourfold comparison, as reported by then head gardener Walker Abel, can help you decide which crop-raising method would be best in your own plot.

Yields

Each method can obviously be used to produce beautiful and bountiful vegetables. But for what it's worth, in our test, the BFI and RB areas were comparable: They yielded both the most and the healthiest vegetables. The CR garden produced substantially less food than did our "winners," and the DM plot fared the worst, with stunted growth and persistent insect problems. In fairness, though, let me say right away that a deep-mulch garden requires a few years to develop the mature compost layer that is essential to its maximum effectiveness. So that plot would probably perform better in subsequent seasons.

I don't want to put too much emphasis on the differences in harvest we obtained from the four plots. Indeed, the real significance of this experiment could be seen in the other striking differences between the four minigardens.