AMERICAN INTENSIVE SOLAR GARDENING

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We define "American intensive gardening" as a continuous food producing system, one that provides an ideal growing environment for the entire plant. By creating and maintaining a deep, well-balanced, fertile soil, the system optimizes growing conditions below the ground. By using heat-assisting devices to create beneficial microclimates for seedlings and mature plants, it ensures optimum growing conditions above the ground.

Planting in Rows…

is actually the result of mechanization and not very space efficient for small beds.

The intensive, open bed design, with drop frames placed around individual plantings, minimized the space waste of traditional rows.

Open Beds

Everything in life has its pluses and minuses. In our second decade of gardening, the minuses associated with raised beds started to outweigh the pluses. We began keeping track of how much time we spent landscaping the beds: edging, siding, mulching, and smoothing and evening them after adding horse manure. We spent some 20 or 30 hours a season just mulching the rows between beds.

Sure, the beds looked great, but was all this landscaping work really necessary for food production? Also, since our goal was to not step on the garden soil, tasks like trellising became awkward with the raised beds. Maybe we were just getting older and lazier, but we decided we needed another system, one that would be easier, simpler, and better than raised-bed gardening.

Another factor that changed the way we wanted to garden was the flexibility of our solar appliances. Since moving plants always sets them back, no matter how carefully they're transplanted, it made more sense to move the appliances than to move the plants. More and more we found ourselves planting beds of vegetables in formations that could accommodate the appliances we would later set over them.

We also kept exploring new ways to use the appliances in different seasons, with definite goals in mind: First, we wanted to create a gardening system that would give us greater flexibility than our four-foot by 50-foot raised beds, which were locked up in a military-like formation. Second, we wanted to grow more in less space.

We realized we needed portable bases we could easily place over crops when they needed Pod protection. So Lea built six simple four-by-eight-foot rectangular bases out of pressure-treated two-by-six-inch boards to go under the Pods. We called the bases "drop frames."

These simple, humble devices became the catalyst for a whole new way of thinking about bed gardening.

The drop frames proved to be inexpensive to build and easy to move around. They represented an immediate and obvious improvement over our network of permanent board-sided raised beds. Used by themselves, the drop frames were wonderful to sit on while planting or weeding, especially with a board set over the top that could slide along, making a most comfortable seating arrangement. Two or three drop frames could be piled on top of each other to provide quick wind protection for seedlings. With screening or netting set over the drop frames, insects and birds could not damage the crops. What we loved most about them was the way in which the frames defined planting areas into standard four-by-eight-foot or (placing two side by side) eight-by-eight-foot beds.

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