Intensive and Solomon-style gardens
Steve Solomon started his garden journey
in the 1970s and jumped right
on the intensive gardening bandwagon. Intensive gardening is a
term
Solomon uses to encompass techniques like square
foot gardening
and lasagna gardening
(and, to some extent, my garden) that promise to grow more vegetables
in less space using raised beds and high influxes of organic matter and
water.
Solomon was so enthusiastic that he wrote books on
the subject, but over time his feelings changed.
In 1979, he founded Territorial Seed company and began to grow large
trial gardens to test out his company's vegetable varieties. He
wrote:
Solomon goes on to argue that Peak Oil will soon make fertilizers
(organic and chemical) and electricity to pump water more
expensive. At
the same time, more and more people will need to grow their own food
for
financial reasons. Solomon notes that his methods will not only
save money
by reducing the input of fertilizers and water, but will also require
only about half the time you'd spend tending an intensive garden.
Even
if you don't believe in Peak Oil, if your goal (like ours) is to grow
as much of your own food as possible, it just makes sense to save
yourself time and money in the process.
This post is part of our Gardening When It Counts lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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