A BioIntensive Garden
We are including this article although
the system used needs to be called Biointensive
instead of GROW BIOINTENSIVE. That is because of
the use of a rototiller, a shredder and drip irrigation,
none of which are part of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE
system. However, it should provide inspiration for
those people just starting to grow food. The Groves
live south of San Francisco, California.
A Biointensive Garden—Notes
on Year One
By Nancy Grove
(Disclaimer: The author is a certified
UCCE Master Gardener, but the opinions expressed
herein are her own and do not reflect official UC
policy or teaching.)
As David Mas Masumoto notes in
his lyrical autobiography, Epitaph for a Peach,
a true farmer, by the end of the harvest, is always
thinking, "What will I do differently next
year?"
It was a great first year for
two newly retired physicians at what we half-jokingly,
half-hopefully, call "Grove Farms." The
"farms" are 500 square feet of double-dug,
composted, almost-organic raised beds (we did use
B. thuringiensis for tomato fruitworm, and grass
clippings from lawns that had been fed with commercial
fertilizers). As a recent retiree last fall with
a newly available plot of land, I started taking
the GROW BIOINTENSIVE courses whenever they were
available at Common Ground, eager to start my vegetable
garden while I awaited acceptance into the Santa
Clara County Master Gardener training program. After
the GROW BIOINTENSIVE overview course, I knew this
was the holistic, integrated, sustainable approach
that I was looking for. In retrospect, it has made
our family intensely aware of the inputs and outputs
from our land, to the point where we use our electric
shredder (for the compost pile) only until noon,
because we have gone to a time-of-use meter with
PG&E and our rates go way up in the afternoon.
Next step, solar photovoltaic!
We began with compost. Couldn’t
get it hot enough. This year’s piles are so
much better, due to 1) size (we aim for 4X4X4 feet
solidly enclosed on three sides) and 2) drying the
wet, messy stuff on chicken wire racks and then
shredding everything but grass clippings. But with
help from a couple of BFI free-compost days plus
our home-grown material, we collected enough for
two cubic yards per 100-sq-ft bed.
Winter greens: Our
first experiment with building flats, making starter
soil, and pricking out. We built ten flats for about
$90 with Home Depot supplies. I was not happy with
the recipe for the starter soil (half sifted compost
and half bed soil, according to the textbook for
the GROW BIOINTENSIVE courses, How to Grow More
Vegetables…) mostly because the soil we started
with was roughly the consistency of an adobe brick.
I also found the multiple transfers from flat to
flat incredibly time-consuming (the limiting resource
in the GROW BIOINTENSIVE philosophy is assumed to
be land, and to a lesser extent water, but we had
some "time and labor" limitations as well!).
But by November last year we had lettuce, kale,
parsley, mustard, spinach, and radicchio in the
ground, and just as one of our wonderful lecturers
from Ecology Action in Willits predicted, the baby
greens just "sat there and looked at us"
because by then there were only about ten hours
of daylight. But when they blasted forth in the
spring, it was almost overwhelming. One change for
next year is to commit to absolute rigor in sequential
seeding so that everything isn’t ready for
harvest at once.
The greens were started in reasonably
tillable, loamy soil that had been previously used
for flower beds. We couldn’t start the double-digging
process in our orchard until we had had some rain.
Yes, we rototilled (a no-no, but necessary for us).
I sowed 25 lb of winter rye in early December (behind
schedule already!) and in March-April we weed-whacked,
rototilled again, and built the beds (4X25 feet
instead of the recommended 5X20 feet), using five-foot
lengths of 1X6 redwood and wood stakes.
The double-digging was really
hard. I wish I had bought John Jeavons’ video,
because I think our backs would be in better shape.
(Yes, we had some younger volunteers pitch in, too.)
But it was so rewarding to see the mass of tiny
rye roots coursing through the clods we turned up.
And earthworms! Talk about inefficient—I would
keep stopping to crumble up clods by hand, because
I had a terror of severing our allies the worms!
At the end, we had raised beds that stood a good
6-8" above the surrounding soil and were dark
and compost-y.
Irrigation: We
put in a drip system, assisted in the design by
the good folks at Urban Farmer, a wonderful store
up in San Francisco (worth the drive; there’s
nothing like them down here). Spent about $450 to
put in 9V-battery-powered timers, pressure regulators,
and emitter drip lines. It worked like a charm,
and we only use about ten gallons a night (while
seedlings were getting started) to every other night
(rest of the summer). The best thing about actually
buying components was that it FORCED us to be absolutely
clear about our planting plan—adjacent crops,
sun rotation, spacing, emitter size, etc.). Use
graph paper and pay attention to scale. It really
helps!
Plantings: We
have gotten all of our seed from the open-pollinated
cultivars available at Common Ground Store in Palo
Alto. The germination rate was fabulous, and I would
plant almost every variety again. We had some surprises—some
parsnips in with our carrots and a lovely interloper
among the squash in the form of a highly productive
Kabocha squash (Japanese pumpkin) with a wonderfully
sweet, orange pulp. We propagated all the squash,
cucumbers, melons, leeks, chives, carrots, radishes,
and turnips from seed; tomatoes, eggplant, chiles,
and herbs we got at the Master Gardeners’
Spring Garden Market in April (an annual event,
don’t miss it). The master charts in HTGMV
for buying seeds or seedlings, spacing, and yield
are incredibly helpful, and we paid attention.
Pests: Squirrels,
squirrels, and more squirrels. They would have eaten
every tomato, as they had all our stone fruits in
the orchard earlier in the spring. They have no
natural predators in our area, and definitive solutions
are hard to come by. We ended up building a ten-foot-tall
(the tomatoes had really taken off!) "Tomato
Pagoda" covering our entire tomato bed, which
contained 19 plants. Unfortunately the framing was
first covered by bird netting. Forget it. The squirrels
treat it like dental floss, and are through it in
no time. Then we undertook an incredibly laborious
process of covering the whole thing with hardware
cloth (this structure cost, in total, about $450).
We had to be rigorous about closing every opening
because where the squirrels couldn’t get in
the roof rats could. The project took two days,
and my husband even camped out overnight with our
German shepherds to keep the varmints away during
the night the tomatoes were vulnerable.
But it all paid off in the end!
We have had a phenomenal harvest and have had the
pleasure of sharing produce with friends and those
less well off, through the dining room at St. Anthony
of Padua in Redwood City (a Second Harvest participant).
We also revived our canning skills, and between
freezing and canning are closing in on 150 quarts
of produce for the year.
Yes, there are things we will
do differently next year. But Common Ground and
the GROW BIOINTENSIVE method were at the center
of our success. If we, collectively, could put a
spading fork in the hands of everyone in the world
who now carries a gun, we’d have peace and
vegetables, and renewed hope for "this fragile
earth, our island home."
|