AMERICAN INTENSIVE SOLAR GARDENING

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Indigenous Solutions

Meantime, we had started an association of homesteaders in our county. At one of our meetings someone brought in a film about organic gardening in Japan. One scene showed a farmer walking along a high, mounded bed on a board and then reaching down to pull out (with some effort) a diakon radish the size of a baseball bat. That one image in the film impressed itself indelibly on our minds.

We began to research how indigenous peoples fed themselves, both historically and in the present. Indigenous solutions evolve when people live in one place over a long period of time, working with an area's resources and limitations to provide shelter, food, fuel, clothing, and transportation. We discovered that most preindustrial indigenous growing systems consisted of mounds, terraces, or beds. Gardening in rows is a relatively recent phenomenon, closely linked to the rise of mechanized agriculture. Clearly, intensive agriculture was not a new fad but an ancient and efficient method of growing crops in many climates and cultures.

The following year we converted our garden into 18 five-by-50-foot raised beds. We made the beds 50 feet long because that distance represented half of the garden's length. Four feet seemed to be the most useful width because we could easily reach the middle of the bed from either side. The beds were two feet apart from crown to crown and the paths between the beds were one foot wide. An opened newspaper fit exactly from edge to edge and two flakes of mulch hay placed side by side perfectly covered the newspaper.

At first our idea of bed building involved simply adding humus material and fluffing the beds into shape. Then it became obvious that if we took the useful dirt from the pathways and piled it onto the beds, we could raise the beds by lowering the pathways and make use of every bit of our valuable soil. That fall we began to experiment with crude seasonal extenders made by surrounding part of a bed with hay bales and stretching polyethylene sheeting across the top of the bales.

Here I am at work in one of Lea's first Solar Pods. No amount of snow was going to stop us from eating fresh!

We left several of these seasonal extenders in place and the next spring we got a jump on planting peas and members of the cabbage family. We began to mulch carrots, beets, turnips, and parsnips for midwinter harvest and discovered that carrots and parsnips kept growing underneath the snow. Attention was soon directed toward our unusual garden, and even the county extension agent dropped by to see what we were up to.

In 1974, we built permanent wooden sides for our raised beds. These board-sided beds concentrated the humus-building material we added to the garden, prevented rainwater from running off the beds, and kept the sides neat. We had already been edging and mulching the dirt-sided beds, but the boards were more effective.

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