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  • From: "clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>
  • To: <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] Yields
  • Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2004 10:44:50 -0500

I have been among those for some time now who advocate that to be vegetable (and perhaps fruit and grain) self-sufficient, you don't really need a big farm nor even a big garden. This past year I combined that idea with the idea of going out of my way to make the garden diverse. What that means is that unlike most past gardens where I planted very large beds of one crop, this time I rather planted very small plots of things all over the garden -- just as much garden and just as many plants, only they were scattered out. For one thing it is a hedge against doing something stupid or having really bad luck and having a total crop failure on say 100' of bed of cabbage. All the beds in this garden are 4' wide and I planted the cabbages in 3' or 4' of bed all over the garden. Likewise most crops. This way if one plot fails, the odds are the others won't. The other advantages are that it really confuses pests all the way from fungus to deer. And I only have a little of something maturing at once.

I often leave potatoes in the ground all winter under mulch and dig a few pounds at a time. Yesterday I noticed that the deer had been into a plot of Irish Cobbler potatoes, a plot 4' x 7'. They had pawed up a 1' x 4' strip on one side and some sizeable potatoes were lying on the ground. Curious, I though, why didn't they eat them? Experience says that the deer will be back until the entire plot is gone so I dug them all up.

This plot was planted in a method I've been playing with for years where I put seed pieces right on the weeds and haulms of the poorest plot I have and then cover it with whatever I have - compost, manure, old hay, grass clippings, rotted sawdust, leaves, etc. The first covering is about 20", a sort of in-situ compost pile, and it soon decays down to about 6". More and more is added until the blossoms fall from the potato plants, it seems no more tubers are set after that. Weeds don't grow on this heap of organic material so that's it for the season until the tops die. If the tops die early, and many do, the plot may be planted with beans or squash or cucumbers or such.

The deer marauded plot was just such on of these. When I dug it up, I solved the mystery. They HAD eaten some potatoes, but they had probably gotten full and left. From the 4' x 7' plot I got 42 lbs of potatoes, about 1 1/2 pounds of potatoes per square foot. Even for our large family that many potatoes cooks a lot of meals.

I didn't get that many potatoes from every plot, but my odds are increasing as I pay attention to how potatoes in organic mulch in broad beds don't grow the same way they do in rows with chemical fertilizer.

The intriguing thing about this is that crunching the numbers on the yields from SMALL intensive plots from the past few years, the *ideal* garden that is extrapolated from those yields to support most of the food needs of a person is quite modest. With the price of decent food on the climb, small plots for market promise to augment one's cash far more than they did in the recent past.

This winter everyone is claiming there are no tomatoes. Last time this happened the price of tomatoes didn't go down for three years (from gouging, I think). That made me think twice as passed the 16' x 16' pig pen. When the pigs are gone here in a few weeks, I have hallucinated about making it into a tomato garden for market to pay for the cost of next year's pigs.

James





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