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market-farming - Re: Permanent Raised Beds

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflondon AT mindspring.com>
  • To: market-farming
  • Subject: Re: Permanent Raised Beds
  • Date: Tue, 01 Feb 2000 16:25:02 -0500


On Tue, 01 Feb 2000 13:17:22 -0500, Alex McGregor
<waldenfarm AT sprintmail.com> wrote:

>Rose & Fred Lieberman wrote:

>> It always seemed to me - with no experience in permanent raised beds - that
>> over time the bed would become dense and lose its tilth, then you'd have to

Not if you incorporate enough biomass and rock powders into the soil.
Remineralize - add finished compost aged manures and manure and/or
compost tea - add soil amendments such as alfalfa meal, soybean meal,
bone meal, cottonseed/feather/peanutshell meal. Double dig or do the
equivalent of this, add most of the biomass and soil amendments and
rock powders in the top 6" to 12" of garden soil.

>> go into the bed with a tiller of some kind, and that would be more of a
>> pain.

>We have 70 raised beds, all of which have been tilled (not rototilled) one
>time. They're
>"raised" because of the amount of air space our tillage incorporated into
>the soil- not
>by adding material on top. Some of these beds were tilled 15 years ago and
>none have ever
>been tilled again. Our soil management techniques encourage the soil life to
>build and maintain
>a stable soil structure which maintains the physical structure established
>by the tillage.

That's it in a nutshell. This is the optimum bed
preparation/maintenance method; used worldwide for thousands of years;
Paris market gardeners to subsistence and market farmers in Southeast
Asia.
Lawrence F. London, Jr. Venaura Farm
http://metalab.unc.edu/intergarden InterGarden
http://metalab.unc.edu/permaculture PermaSphere
http://metalab.unc.edu/intergarden/orgfarm AGINFO
lflondon AT mindspring.com london AT metalab.unc.edu





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