Whether you grow food on a spacious homestead or are digging into your first urban garden, ditching the plant-by-rows approach and instead adopting intensive gardening techniques can help you grow a more productive garden that’s also more efficient to manage. These methods will open up a new world when it comes to small-space gardening, which can be so much more than just a few lone pots on a balcony. If you do it right, you can grow more food in less space and put an impressive dent in your household’s fresh-food needs.
Comparing 2 Popular Intensive Gardening Methods
Two gardening authors and their systems of intensive vegetable gardening have been highly influential in North America for more than 30 years. Mel Bartholomew’s book on “square-foot” gardening was first published in 1981, while John Jeavons’ first book on “biointensive” gardening came out in 1974. Since these books hit the shelves, millions of gardeners have experimented with and embraced the gardening techniques advocated within.
Bartholomew’s aim with square-foot gardening is a simple, foolproof system that anyone can master (no companion planting, no crop rotation and no soil preparation). He prescribes raised beds of only 6 inches deep for most crops, filled with an artificial mix of peat moss, vermiculite and compost. While this method is reliant on assembling purchased components, it can work well in urban spaces, especially where soil contamination is a concern, where digging into the ground isn’t an option, or where people are especially picky about how a garden looks (perhaps because of ordinances for front lawns). Check out “10 Tenets of Square-Foot Gardening” below for more on this method.
Jeavons’ biointensive gardening system is based on developing fertile soil in permanent garden beds that you initially dig to a depth of 2 feet. His primary goal is to grow food sustainably, using as few inputs from outside of the system as possible. He provides detailed instructions on crop planning, making compost, companion planting, crop rotation, growing crops that serve a dual purpose as food and compost-heap fodder, and more. See “10 Tenets of Biointensive Gardening” later in this article for the skinny on this system.
4 Principles of Intensive Gardening
Despite such differing approaches, both sets of techniques deliver high-yielding food gardens thanks to four common features, all of which I recommend.
1. Permanent garden beds. Establishing permanent beds enables you to concentrate your efforts only on where plants grow, without wasting compost or irrigation water on unplanted areas. It also makes soil compaction a nonissue, because you walk on permanent pathways and never on your growing areas. Setting up permanent beds and paths is such a popular layout here in the Pacific Northwest that I haven’t seen a garden arranged in rows for years. (Read more about the benefits of permanent garden beds in Care and Cultivation of Permanent Garden Beds.)2. Reliance on compost. Both systems rely on the tried-and-true groundwork of all organic gardening: heavy doses of compost to supply balanced, slow-release nutrients needed to grow healthy crops. The organic matter in compost also increases soil’s water-holding capacity and improves its texture.
3. High-density mixed planting. A key to the high productivity of both systems is that they take advantage of the entire surface of each bed to grow plants rather than leaving spaces between rows. This results in even more yield without adding more garden space. For novice gardeners, Bartholomew’s method of marking off beds in 1-foot squares may be particularly helpful as a way to visualize how densely one can plant. Interspersing crops with different root depths, plant heights and growth rates also means you can grow more in a given space.
4. Prompt succession planting. Staggered planting and, thus, staggered harvests are more efficient for the gardener and maximize the growing season. Quickly replanting any gaps left after harvesting a particular crop lets you use every area of the garden throughout the year.
Customize Your Intensive Gardening System
With fertile soil and dense planting, any garden can be highly productive — but as these two intensive-gardening approaches show, you can achieve this productivity via different means. I’m on Bartholomew’s side in favoring simple, low-maintenance methods (after all, the energy of the gardener is a valuable resource, too), but gardeners can learn much from Jeavons about sustainable practices. Reducing the use of nonrenewable resources — whether it’s fossil fuels burned in transporting supplies, irrigation water from deep aquifers or even peat moss — is an important consideration and one that’s on many gardeners’ minds. Square-foot gardening calls for purchasing a large amount of peat moss, which isn’t a renewable material. Coconut coir is a more sustainable option.
With time and experience, and based on the region and circumstances, every gardener tailors his or her system to what works best. I’ve talked with hundreds of gardeners over the past few decades to glean some of the commonalities between successful gardening systems, and the resulting recommendations that follow here will help you grow a high-yield but low-maintenance, sustainable garden.
Adapt to local conditions. Soil, climate, weather, water availability, composting materials, pests and diseases vary depending on where you live, so learn from local experts and look for information written for your region. (Connect with nearby gardeners on MOTHER EARTH NEWS' new Facebook pages for each state and province.) The space you have available and the ease with which you can transport materials will also influence your gardening decisions. If you have a tiny urban garden, you aren’t likely to be able to grow a considerable amount of grain crops for supplying carbonaceous compostable materials, as Jeavons suggests doing. Creating nutrients and organic matter by making compost out of other ingredients, such as fall leaves and newspapers mixed with food scraps, may make more sense. For a large garden with more space, however, growing compostable or “green manure” crops may be the most practical way to build the organic matter in your soil.Go permanent. The effectiveness of using permanent garden beds is undisputed. Whether permanent beds should be raised, however, depends on the site and on personal preference. Raised beds — constructed with sides to allow the soil to be built up higher than the natural soil level — allow for good drainage on low-lying land and warm up quickly in spring. Older and less mobile folks could benefit from raised beds because they’re higher up and easier to work in. Gardens on well-drained soil, however, may fare better and need less water if the beds are not raised — and, of course, you won’t have the job and expense of building sides for your beds.
Use soil (if you have it). A con of Bartholomew’s system is that it relies so heavily on buying the ingredients to make your growing medium. This is expensive and means you aren’t using and improving the soil already on your property. Despite Bartholomew’s concern that improving soil takes too long, I’ve found that adding organic amendments, including balanced organic fertilizers if needed, can turn any soil into decent garden soil in its first few seasons. Generous applications of compost increase the nutrient- and water-holding capacity of sandy soils and improve the structure of clay soils. Regarding water conservation, plants growing in the ground usually need less irrigation than plants in containers or raised beds do, because soil-bound plants benefit from capillary flow of water from the subsoil. This upward movement of water can come from a depth of 2 to 8 feet, depending on the type of soil. Deep-rooted plants will also survive cold snaps and heat waves better than plants in containers and raised beds because their roots are subjected to less-extreme temperature swings. Of course, if your best sunny spot is a paved parking lot, by all means, build raised beds (the deeper, the better).
Be cheap. The first time I read Bartholomew’s book, I was struck by how expensive following his system to the letter would be, from the cost of building beds to buying and hauling a large volume of bulky materials for the growing medium — which he calls “Mel’s mix.” To me, the beauty of gardening is that it transforms waste material into tasty, nourishing food at a considerably lower cost than buying it. Compost can be virtually free if made from waste materials, such as grass clippings, leaves, manure, spoiled hay, and any waste from your garden, the grocery store or the food industry. Perhaps the ultimate in cheap fertilizer is “pee-cycling,” which merits wider acceptance for its effectiveness. (Go to Free, Homemade Liquid Fertilizers for more information on this method and other liquid fertilizer options.)Don’t work too hard. When I initially encountered Jeavons’ book in the 1970s, I set out to follow his technique for double-digging my garden. I quickly discovered, despite Jeavons’ cheery instructions, that this was a daunting amount of work. When you finish shifting the soil, you will have moved all of the soil in the bed sideways by 1 or 2 feet and down to a depth of 2 feet. After digging one bed, I decided to skip the rest and live with the consequences — except none seemed to crop up. I saw no difference between the double-dug bed and the rest of the garden throughout that summer or in later years. Similarly, a 1998 study by Ohio State University found no significant yield difference between beans and beets grown in beds that had been cultivated only on the surface and beds that had been double-dug.
Over many years of intensive gardening, I have learned (as have many gardeners before me) that layering on mulches saves a lot of labor, and that minimal cultivation of beds works just fine. Research has provided sound reasons why minimizing soil disturbance is a good idea: Reduced-tillage systems result in higher populations of beneficial fungi that move nutrients and water through the soil column. Also, soils that receive less disruption have more beneficial nematodes, earthworms, soil mites and other microorganisms wriggling and crawling about. Neither Bartholomew’s artificial planting medium nor Jeavons’ repeated double-digging takes full advantage of such hardworking critters.
Because earthworms, plant roots and soil insects are so good at aerating soil, I’m happy to leave it to them. Without turning over the soil, I lightly fork compost and other amendments into the top couple of inches once a year, which takes me about 15 minutes for an 8-by-4-foot bed. For the rest of the season, I plant without cultivating, allowing easy interplanting by slipping in new plants between maturing crops. I often leave crop residues on the soil as a mulch and plant right through it. Creating minimal disturbance has led to a bountiful garden with less work on my part. This can, however, require a slight shift from the “clean soil” garden aesthetic some value.
Weeding is, for most, a dreaded task, but it can be almost eliminated by smart planting. Intensive planting suppresses weeds, as the leaves of nearby plants quickly fill in and shade the soil. Using mulch to keep the soil covered is effective at smothering germinating weed seeds. I leave mulch on the soil for as much of the garden season as possible (weeds grow all winter in my Northwest climate), but I pull it back in spring to allow the soil to dry out and warm up. You can control weeds in pathways by laying down cardboard, newspaper or other light-excluding materials, or sow the pathways to grass or clover and mow (or scythe) them every now and then. Put the clippings back on the garden beds as a nitrogen-rich mulch.Making compost can be as simple as putting everything in a bin, waiting for a season to pass, and then spreading the most digested material on the garden and returning undigested material to the bin. Or, don’t make compost at all: Just leave organic material on the soil to decompose. Any plant material, including crop residues and pulled weeds, will impart organic matter as soil organisms break it down. Roots are another source of organic matter, so instead of pulling plants when clearing a bed, I cut them at the soil line and leave the roots to decompose.
Keep it simple. My eyes glaze over when I see equations and complicated charts in a gardening book, and Bartholomew’s and Jeavons’ books aren’t short on either. While I generally vote for skipping overcomplicated and prescriptive planting advice, I do think keeping basic gardening records is useful. They don’t need to be elaborate, but recording when and what you plant, harvest dates, and notes on pest problems is a good idea so you have this information and can make well-informed adjustments when you plan next year’s garden. (To keep such records digitally, try the MOTHER EARTH NEWSVegetable Garden Planner.)
Ignore the bewildering number of gardening rules and myths floating around the Internet and other sources. For example, companion-planting charts of the “tomatoes love basil” variety are largely myth, though the value of planting to cycle nutrients to different crop families and attract beneficial insects is well-established (go to Maintain Healthy Soil With Crop Rotation for more). In my experience, you can safely disregard most crop-rotation systems, because relatively few crops in a diverse food garden are likely to suffer from soilborne diseases or pests. After you know what problems occur in your region, you know which crops to rotate. Where I live, for example, the high risk of root disease in the onion family and for potatoes makes four-year crop rotations smart for these, but I don’t worry about allowing long rotations for other vegetables.
Relax and smile. Gardens should be individualistic and fun. They can be as tidy or as wild as you like, take little effort to maintain, and still produce an astonishing amount of food from a small area. If digging beds, turning compost or setting up growing boxes works for you, carry on — just don’t think any of it is a strict requirement for a bountiful garden. Personally, I figure the less time and effort it takes to grow food, the more time there is to enjoy it!
10 Tenets of Square-Foot Gardening
1. Cultivate in small, raised garden boxes that are at least 6 inches deep, separated into a 1-by-1-foot grid pattern (often 16 squares per box).
2. Fill boxes with a growing medium made of one-third peat moss, one-third vermiculite and one-third blended compost.
3. Intensively plant a prescribed number of each crop you choose to grow into each grid space, depending on plant size. (See Bartholomew’s book for the prescribed numbers. For example, plant one broccoli per square and plant 16 carrots per square.)
4. Sow only the number of seeds needed in each square to avoid wasting seed.
5. Add no fertilizer; rely on the compost in the growing medium for nutrients.
6. Practice low-maintenance gardening, with no digging, tilling, soil prep, soil testing or cultivating.
7. Achieve staggered harvests with succession planting.
8. Capitalize on vertical space by growing vining crops on supports.
9. Leave wide aisles (at least 3 feet wide) between your growing boxes to easily work in your beds and maneuver between them.
10. Employ tools minimally — you should only need a trowel for transplanting, a pencil for poking holes and lifting seedlings out of pots, and scissors for harvesting.Order Mel Bartholomew’s book All New Square Foot Gardening for more information.
2. Fill boxes with a growing medium made of one-third peat moss, one-third vermiculite and one-third blended compost.
3. Intensively plant a prescribed number of each crop you choose to grow into each grid space, depending on plant size. (See Bartholomew’s book for the prescribed numbers. For example, plant one broccoli per square and plant 16 carrots per square.)
4. Sow only the number of seeds needed in each square to avoid wasting seed.
5. Add no fertilizer; rely on the compost in the growing medium for nutrients.
6. Practice low-maintenance gardening, with no digging, tilling, soil prep, soil testing or cultivating.
7. Achieve staggered harvests with succession planting.
8. Capitalize on vertical space by growing vining crops on supports.
9. Leave wide aisles (at least 3 feet wide) between your growing boxes to easily work in your beds and maneuver between them.
10. Employ tools minimally — you should only need a trowel for transplanting, a pencil for poking holes and lifting seedlings out of pots, and scissors for harvesting.Order Mel Bartholomew’s book All New Square Foot Gardening for more information.
10 Tenets of Biointensive Gardening
1. Loosen soil in raised-bed planting sites by “double-digging” to a depth of 2 feet.
2. Space crops tightly in a hexagonal planting pattern.
3. Apply no chemicals.
4. Compost on-site and use compost to amend and build your soil.
5. Use synergistic planting (also called “companion planting”) so that plants grown together enhance each other.
6. Plant dual-purpose, carbon-efficient crops — such as grains — in about 60 percent of the growing area. (Such crops provide a significant amount of dietary calories as well as a significant amount of carbonaceous material for composting.)
7. Grow calorie-efficient root crops, such as potatoes, in about 30 percent of the growing area.
8. Sow open-pollinated seeds to preserve genetic diversity.
9. Create a “closed,” interrelated growing system in which enough organic matter is produced by your “mini-farm” to sustain the soil within the system.
10. Produce food in a way that, compared with conventional farming, greatly reduces the use of resources, and places a focus on diversity, soil building and achieving high yields.
2. Space crops tightly in a hexagonal planting pattern.
3. Apply no chemicals.
4. Compost on-site and use compost to amend and build your soil.
5. Use synergistic planting (also called “companion planting”) so that plants grown together enhance each other.
6. Plant dual-purpose, carbon-efficient crops — such as grains — in about 60 percent of the growing area. (Such crops provide a significant amount of dietary calories as well as a significant amount of carbonaceous material for composting.)
7. Grow calorie-efficient root crops, such as potatoes, in about 30 percent of the growing area.
8. Sow open-pollinated seeds to preserve genetic diversity.
9. Create a “closed,” interrelated growing system in which enough organic matter is produced by your “mini-farm” to sustain the soil within the system.
10. Produce food in a way that, compared with conventional farming, greatly reduces the use of resources, and places a focus on diversity, soil building and achieving high yields.
Order John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables, which details the complete biointensive growing system.
Linda A. Gilkeson holds a doctorate in entomology and has been educating gardeners through workshops and writing for more than 20 years. She gardens in British Columbia and is the author of several gardening books, most recently Backyard Bounty: The Complete Guide to Year-Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest.
What to Plant Now
A single region can contain multiple microclimates, so to help you get the most accurate planting times for your garden crops, we’ve created this What to Plant Now tool. The tool uses your ZIP code to access the weather data for your exact location, and then gives you a recommended planting window for 30 common garden crops.
The blue line represents the window in which you can start seeds indoors, the green line tells you when you can plant transplants or sow seeds outdoors, and the orange line represents the expected harvest period for each crop. You can print out a handy planting calendar after you enter your information. Then, the What to Plant Now tool even sends you email reminders when it’s time to plant your crops.
Click on “View Planting Dates” to get started.
Find out when to plant crops in your location
We use historical data from your local weather station to calculate the best range of planting dates for your location.
Example Planting Calendar
More Great Gardening Resources
In addition to our What to Plant Now tool, please take a look at some of our other popular gardening tools and resources:
Vegetable Garden Planner: This highly acclaimed online tool makes it simple to sketch out your growing areas, add plants and rearrange them to get the perfect layout. After you select the crops you want to grow, the Planner software uses an extensive database of about 200 crops and nearly 5,000 weather stations to recommend planting times based on average frost dates for your ZIP code.
Grow Planner app: This app takes the amazing functionality of the Vegetable Garden Planner to the iPad platform, making it easy to take your garden plans right out into the garden with you.
When to Plant app: If you like the streamlined planting calendar provided via the What to Plant Now tool, you will really love this easy-to-use iPhone app, which formats planting information for about 200 crops in a similar format.
Crop Growing Guides: Get clear, concise advice on how to grow 51 crops, from classics such as tomatoes to staples such as grains. These guides include cooking suggestions, harvesting tips and organic pest-control advice, in addition to planting and growing basics.
Garden Know-How series: Learn food-growing essentials from award-winning garden writer Barbara Pleasant. The many articles in this series cover everything from weeding, watering and season extension to soil fertility and composting.
Organic Pest Control series: Dealing with pest pressure in your garden? Get info on the main garden pests, several beneficial insects, and the best natural pest control options.
Seed and Plant Finder: This custom online tool lets you search the websites of more than 500 mail-order seed companies and nurseries, so you can find a specific plant variety or species efficiently.
Directory of Mail-Order Seed and Plant Companies: Great new seed companies are popping up all over these days, and our directory profiles each company and helps you find the ones located near you.
- See more at: http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/what-to-plant-now-zl0z0903zalt.aspx?newsletter=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=GFSS%20eNews&utm_campaign=01.24.14%20GFSS#sthash.XnjbtIhY.dpuf
Is this the year you finally start a garden? Or maybe you long for one more bed of bush beans, or you need space for one last pair of tomatoes. Although it’s best to dig or till the soil before you plant, it isn’t essential. Here are several ways to create usable planting space with no digging. Later on, when the season winds down and you have more time, you can turn this year’s instant beds into primo permanent planting space.
Easiest No-Dig Options
The best way to start a new garden bed is by digging a new site to incorporate organic matter and remove weeds. But in a pinch you can just cover the area with cardboard or layers of wet newspaper, followed by several inches of grass clippings, shredded leaves or weed-free hay or straw. Use a hand trowel to pull back the mulch, cut away sod, and open up planting holes for stocky transplants, including tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, herbs, flowers — whatever transplants you can buy will work.
If your soil is hopelessly hard and infertile, line your car trunk with a tarp or old shower curtain, and head to a garden center for a load of 40-pound bags of topsoil. (If you can’t decide between products and brands, buy an assortment and put them to the test.) Slash drainage holes in the bottoms of the bags, then lay them over the area you want for your growing bed. Use a sharp utility knife or scissors to cut away the tops of the bags. Moisten well, then plant the bags with seeds or transplants, and mulch to cover the bags. (When growing tomatoes in bags, allow one bag of topsoil per plant.)
Straw Bale Solutions
In 2004, following the lead of horticulture professors N. L. Mansour from Oregon State and James Stephens in Florida, Rose Marie Nichols McGee and dozens of volunteers grew colorful salad greens in compost-enriched bales of hay and exhibited them at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show to promote the “Plant-A-Row for the Hungry” program. Since then, thousands of gardeners (including me) have tried straw bale beds, which have their pros and cons. On the plus side, you can put one anywhere, and if it’s kept moist all season, the area beneath the bale will show rapid improvement in drainage and tilth thanks to the work of big night crawlers, which thrive beneath straw bale beds. (For more on these beneficial critters, see Worms! Soil-building Workhorses. On the down side, bale beds need a lot of supplemental water and liquid fertilizer, but they are still fun and rewarding to grow. Step by step instructions are available at Nichols Garden Nursery.
To get large-scale “instant” results, use bales of straw or hay to frame a big raised bed (arranged in a rectangle, a 15-bale instant bed will have an 8-by-20-footfootprint). Fill the enclosure with as much soil, compost and any other free or cheap growing mediums you can find. You’ll need a truckload or two, so ask around for a source of well-rotted manure, or maybe your local garden center sells its “spent” potting soil. Allow several days of intermittent watering to thoroughly moisten the growing medium and the bales, and then plant vegetables inside and on top of your straw bale barge. As long as you can keep this setup moist (soaker hose coverage and mulch are mandatory), it will support a huge array of summer vegetables, and decompose into a beautiful bed of organic matter in about a year.
The Frame Game
Other easy ways to create instant beds involve setting up a frame of some kind, and filling the frame with growing medium. The frame can be a temporary affair made from plastic fencing or untreated boards, or you can build frames from scrap lumber, slender logs or stacked block or stone. Or talk to a fencing company about recycling rails from discarded cedar rail fencing. You don’t need to build four-sided frames — just lay two long rails or logs parallel to each other and fill with soil.
Should you decide to buy framing materials, plastic fencing planks are lightweight and easy to use. Many work with snap-together corner connectors, and many stores carry matching planks and connectors, which are made from recycled plastic and can be mounted on short wood posts. I always need a new bed somewhere, so I’ve invested in heavy, termite-proof composite decking planks. Recycled plastic corner connectors I bought from Gardener’s Supply 12 years ago have helped me plop down instant beds in three states, and they show no signs of giving up. My corner connectors are quite similar to the Raised Bed Corners, still sold by Gardener’s Supply, as well as the Multi-level Raised Bed Stakes sold by Lee Valley Tools.
If you want a more natural frame, a “bird nest” made with brush or stalks and filled to overflowing with compost and soil, is a great way to grow pumpkins or winter squash.
Fill ’Er Up
The fastest no-dig way to get a framed instant bed ready to roll is to fill it with good quality topsoil mixed with compost (see “Bags or Bulk?” below). Using a planting mix makes it possible to set up and plant a new bed within a few hours, and because commercial topsoils and planting mixes are usually free of weeds, they set the stage for a nearly weedless season. In the interest of long-term soil fertility, it’s a good idea to add some fresh green grass clippings or other finely chopped tidbits of fast-rotting organic matter if you can. In addition to providing nutrients plants can use, a sprinkling of juicy green stuff will attract the attention of the soil microorganisms that are the core producers of healthy, fertile soil
There are plenty of other bed-building options. In Lasagna Gardening, author Patricia Lanza recommends covering a new site with newspapers and shredded leaves, followed by alternate layers of compost and peat moss. In Square Foot Gardening, advocate Mel Bartholomew’s favored mix is a three-way blend of peat moss, compost and vermiculite. Either will work, but if you’d rather not use peat moss that’s been dug from ancient bogs, processed and shipped hundreds of miles, simply stick with a mixture of compost and soil. And take note: Gardeners who have access to mushroom compost swear by its amazing ability to support plants grown under lean, first-year conditions. For best results, mix mushroom compost with an equal amount of soil taken from another part of your yard when using it to fill a bed.In my latest book, The Complete Compost Gardening Guide, co-author Deb Martin and I share what we learned over three seasons of using “comforter compost” beds to grow peas, beans, squash and even tomatoes in unimproved sites. The idea is simple: Build a compost pile where you want a new bed, and include soil in the sandwich so that plant roots can anchor themselves comfortably in place. Because they are so bioactive, comforter compost beds are gluttons for mulch, and without mulch they dry out quickly.
Follow-up Care
Instant beds are typically aboveground projects that are installed quickly, without laborious digging of the site. However, if you want to develop the site into excellent growing space in the future, eventually you will need to loosen up the subsoil and work in generous helpings of compost. But why rush? Deep digging of a new site is much easier after it has mellowed below an instant bed for a season, so throwing together quickie beds is a simple way to begin the soil improvement process.
Keep in mind that plants grown in instant beds will probably need more water and fertilizer than plants that can easily send roots deep into fertile soil. Locating instant beds within easy reach of a water supply — and equipping them with soaker hoses — can make the difference between easy success and frustrating failure. You will also find that some crops do better than others, with the best performances delivered by fast-growing summer veggies. In late summer, you can start a new round of instant beds for easy-to-please leafy greens. Adding a plastic cover to foil early freezes could mean homegrown salads for the winter holidays.
Looking Ahead
Any instant bed will cause beneficial changes to the soil beneath it, but some soils need far more help than passive top-down methods can provide. Unless you are blessed with deep, fertile topsoil, sooner or later you will want to physically merge enriched topsoil with impoverished subsoil, which may require serious digging. In one place I started new beds, I needed a miner’s pick to crack into the compacted clay. Still, spots that have been primed with instant beds are always easier to dig.
Seven No-dig New Bed Options
- Lay down cardboard, mulch, set out transplants.
- Plant directly into bags of topsoil.
- Make frame with straw bales and fill.
- Use wood frames and fill with compost or topsoil.
- Build a “bird nest” from brush and fill.
- Make “lasagna” — layers of leaves, peat moss and compost.
- Build compost pile, add soil and plant.
Bags or Bulk?
Buying topsoil or compost in bags is fast and convenient, but how does it compare to buying in bulk? Prices for 40-pound bags of compost-amended topsoil (garden soil) range from $2.30 to $8, so it pays to shop around. You will probably find locally produced products that compete favorably with Black Velvet, a national brand with a nice price tag of $2.50 per 40-pound bag. When used to make instant beds, one such bag will cover about 2 square feet. These big bags typically contain 1 cubic foot by volume, whereas a “scoop” or “bucket” of bulk compost or planting mix contains 20-plus cubic feet, depending on the size of the tractor’s front-end loader. Large buckets carry a full cubic yard, or 27 cubic feet (the equivalent of 27 bags). Bulk compost made from yard waste can cost less than $20 per scoop, but expect to pay twice that much for screened, aged organic farm compost mixed with good topsoil. Use the numbers below for comparing bulk and bagged prices.
BULK
Price per Price per
Cubic YARD Cubic FOOT
$20 = $0.74
$30 = $1.11
$40 = $1.48
$50 = $1.85
$60 = $2.22
Price per Price per
Cubic YARD Cubic FOOT
$20 = $0.74
$30 = $1.11
$40 = $1.48
$50 = $1.85
$60 = $2.22
BAGSPrice per Price per
Cubic FOOT Cubic YARD
$2 = $54
$3 = $81
$4 = $108
$5 = $135
$6 = $162
Cubic FOOT Cubic YARD
$2 = $54
$3 = $81
$4 = $108
$5 = $135
$6 = $162
Contributing editor Barbara Pleasant gardens in southwest Virginia, where she grows vegetables, herbs, fruits, flowers and a few lucky chickens. Contact Barbara by visiting her website or finding her on Google+.
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