Market Farming

["Elizabeth Pike" <pike AT always-online.com>]

From: Rose & Fred Lieberman <pyrite AT clarityconnect.com>

> When does one decide about making a raised bed permanent?

When you decide you're sick of remaking beds every year, or would
rather work with small tools & not tractors, or when you know
time/labor will only allow intensive growing, or you just don't have
"that" amount of land, or when you have enough beds to rotate what you
want to grow, or in your heart, without proof-not yet anyway,  you
feel you're destroying something precious & you find out you are!!
All that thriving life!!  It's all up to you!  Until January, my beds
had not been plowed/tilled/mechanically cultivated since 1993.  (Now
it's all plowed ready to bedded up again, which now won't happen until
next year-arrgghh!   I did wait to have it done while it was dry to
decrease, if at all possible, a great earthworm massacre.  I needed to
reorient the beds, kinda like moving furniture-hated like everything
to do it-I'm a die-hard no-tiller.)

> 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
> go into the bed with a tiller of some kind, and that would be more
of a
> pain.
> What am I not understanding?

Properly prepared beds, when originally built, and all through
subsequent growing seasons, will not lose tilth if you are constantly
adding organic matter-cover cropping, mulching, composting, green
manures, decomposing crops, etc.   These are musts if you want the
beds to stay alive & not pack back down.  The single most important
activity you can do to permanent beds is to broadfork them, as
mentioned in earlier threads.   My beds started out 6" high, and 7
years later measured 8" high.

Liz
Morningstar Gardens
Pollocksville NC