From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Greetings
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:15:18 -0500
Armed With A Mind Armed With A Mind wrote:
> I just wanted to say hello and introduce myself as I'm new to this
place. My name is Travis Philp, I'm from Ontario Canada, and I just
purchased a farm in November so I'm itching to get planting in the
spring. I hope I'm in line with putting it out there that I'd love to
hear any advice in the vein of ' If I could do one thing over again...'
,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.
Travis:
As I set up my 6 acres for market farming I was faced with a number of
issues that could not be avoided and had to have solutions. In a way the
second bissest of them was drainage. So, I would suggest siting your
garden in an area where you can expand its size and account for all the
water that flows through and around it. Soil type is important here,
especially percolation. You can prep your ground with a tractor and
appropriate implements. Making raised beds by hand by double digging or
some variant of that is an excellent way to create productive soil.
With this method you will end up with paths or furrows or ditches
between the beds. You will need to locate the garden and orient the
position of the beds so that excess water can flow away from the garden
and into and through other gardens you have on site. Runoff from the
gardens and around the garden can be directed to some kind of useful
impoundment by way of passing through swales where you have a variety of
plantings, possibly some food crops. Many perennial crops, cane fruits
and other berry crops can grow in your raised beds as well in plantings
elsewhere. The idea is to keep excess water from standing too long in
your gardens and utilize that nutrient and microbe-rich water to
irrigate and fertilize other crops and plantings, or just fallow turf.
I suggest adding a few soil amendments to your garden soil.
These are rock phosphate or colloidal soft phosphate, azomite, greensand
and large quantities of powdered rock from quarries near you. Any kind
of biomass will work for carbon to build levels of organic matter in
your soil, hay, sawdust, shavings, bark, leaves and grasses. For
nitrogen any kind of manure is useful with horse and cow being very good
for building soil tilth. If you have livestock you will have a ready
supply of manure to keep your garden fertile from year to year.
There are many other details about building soil quality that are
important and you will read a lot about this in this forum.
Here are some of my own resources that you might find helpful: