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[ted <music AT thenightshades.com>]

Hi James,

I'm just getting my garden back going after a couple fallow years. I've
always noted that volunteers are the most vigorous plants by far- strong
words but I think true. I read about a Fukuoka (sp?) method where you make
seed balls, balls of compost with at least a hundred kinds of seeds in them,
and plant them everywhere. Whatever is most rampant in it's spot takes over,
and there's a diverse garden with lively plants. It seems possible,
certainly- a way to harness the vigor of volunteers? In a nice loose
harness.

My heart and head have not been quite right without my garden- we've been
harvesting the herbs and echinacea the deer don't eat but were a couple
years overdue for a new fence. I wanted to do the fence right this time-
last time it was skinny fir poles that rotted out fast, but I was eating out
of the garden.
Ted

on 12/5/04 9:01 AM, homestead-request AT lists.ibiblio.org at
homestead-request AT lists.ibiblio.org wrote:

> 
> 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.