Chinese Raised Gardens
An ancient Oriental growing method that has a lot in common with some of the Western world's advanced techniques can give you a better harvest than row gardening with less labor.
An ancient Oriental growing method—that has a lot in
common with some of the Western world's "advanced"
techniques—can give you a better harvest than row
gardening... with less labor.
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Feeding China's one billion people isn't an easy task ...
and feeding them well (as participants on MOTHER's tour to
that country last fall discovered is generally the case)
seems little short of a miracle! And even though the
nation's current administration deserves much of the credit
for this feat, the farming techniques that have enabled
land—which has been tilled for thousands of
years—to remain productive are, themselves,
just short of incredible.
Eighty percent of China's people, using methods developed
over centuries, are now involved in the most intensive and
efficient agricultural system in the world ... and many of
the vegetables that these farm workers—and their city
cousins, too—consume come from private family plots
of raised vegetable beds that are smaller than the space
needed to house a Western farmer's tools!
With the exception of areas containing such "water crops"
as rice and lotus (which require sunken beds), this
intensive gardening technique is used on almost every spare
inch of land. Entire fields of raised beds stretch to the
horizon, and there are tiny strips of cultivated earth
beside factory walls, city dwellings, and highway
right-of-ways. Some small gardens are even tucked in among
the rock monoliths of Kunming's "Stone Forest" national
monument ... and such "postcard-size" plots play a large
part in putting good fresh vegetables on family tables, and
often produce enough surplus to earn the gardeners extra
income at "free markets".
BACKYARD BEDS
If you think that Chinese intensive gardening—which
is designed to get the most benefit out of air, soil, and
water with the least amount of work—sounds like an
ideal method to use for backyard growing ... you're right!
Once created, raised beds are permanent. They never become
waterlogged, never have to be plowed, will "warm up"
earlier than soil tilled in the usual manner and thus allow
you to get a head start on spring planting and—when
one vegetable is harvested—can be worked and
replanted without disturbing the surrounding crops.
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