Chinese Raised Gardens

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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.

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.