Free Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth by Cindy Conner Page A
Authors: Cindy Conner
spots can be homes to spiders. Spiders eat only insects, and live ones at that. All those insects get thirsty, so make sure to provide some water for them. It can be in shallow dishes you set out, a pond in your garden, or even a small wetland. I have only touched the surface of all you could do with companion planting, but I hope I’ve given you an understanding of what is necessary to allow all the benefits of an ecosystem to develop. Diversity is what we are after in a sustainable garden. The more different things we have, the better.
Garden in early March.
Same garden in June.
Rye shedding pollen in early May.
Rye cut for mulch-in-place at pollen shed.
Garden map and Plant / Harvest Schedules.
Ladybug eating an aphid on a cowpea plant.
Sunfield Farm Permaculture Plan.
Spade, garden fork, mattock.
Cultivator and collinear hoe.
Sickle and machete.
Left to right: Trowel, Lesche soil knife, Trake, Cobrahead.
Ginseng sweet potato slips grown in a coldframe, ready to cut off for transplanting.
Purple sweet potatoes with slips grown in jars of water.
Sweet potatoes freshly dug with a garden fork.
Grainmills left to right: Grainmaker, Country Living, Corona.
Threshing with the plastic bat method.
Threshing set-up for the foot method.
Wheat (right) is ready to harvest. Rye (left) will be ready a week later.
Tomato juice (left) and tomato soup (right).
Pressure canner (left) and water bath canner (right) with canning jars and two-piece lids.
Dill (sour) pickles fermenting in a gallon jar.
Traditional straight sided crock, hand carved stomper, Harsch crock.
Corn and bags of cowpeas hanging in the barn waiting for shelling.
Corn and cowpeas in the pantry.
Mississippi Silver cowpeas and Bloody Butcher corn in the garden.
Corn sheller in action.
Solar food dryers in the garden.
Inside of solar dryer based on SunWorks design.
Inside of solar dryer based on Appalachian State University design.
8
Rotations and Sample Garden Maps
N OW THAT YOU HAVE AN IDEA when things are going to be in the garden beds, it might be a good time to fill in the crops on your garden map. It would be easy to just decide where your crops go according to height — short ones on the south side and tall ones in the back. I’ve seen some plans like that and I am always left wondering — but what about next year? As far as I’m concerned, garden maps need to show rotation arrows. These are arrows that show where the crops in one bed move to the next year. A garden growing a sustainable diet will have something growing in each bed all twelve months of the year. It is particularly important to make sure the cover crop that is planted in the fall is the crop you want in that bed in the spring.
Height is still a consideration, but when the sun is high in the sky during the summer months, it may not be as much of a problem as you might think. Observe how much of a shadow your tall crops cast at different times during the growing year. My solar food dryers are on the northwest side of a large maple tree. They get plenty of sun until September when the shadow from that tree extends to the dryers. That’s when I move them. If a sun-loving crop were in that spot it would be fine, as long as it was harvested by early September.
You will want a tight rotation. By tight rotation, I mean that when one crop is harvested, the bed is amended with compost and anything else it needs, and the next crop is planted without delay. The easiest way to accomplish that is to have it all decided ahead of time and shown on your garden map. You will know what is planted where and when, and would have bought the seeds well in advance. I will be talking about seeds in Chapter 9 .
In deciding where everything goes, it is important to not plant crops in the same place they were the year before. Different crops require different things from the soil. If you planted everything in the same place every year, the soil would become
Garden in early March.
Same garden in June.
Rye shedding pollen in early May.
Rye cut for mulch-in-place at pollen shed.
Garden map and Plant / Harvest Schedules.
Ladybug eating an aphid on a cowpea plant.
Sunfield Farm Permaculture Plan.
Spade, garden fork, mattock.
Cultivator and collinear hoe.
Sickle and machete.
Left to right: Trowel, Lesche soil knife, Trake, Cobrahead.
Ginseng sweet potato slips grown in a coldframe, ready to cut off for transplanting.
Purple sweet potatoes with slips grown in jars of water.
Sweet potatoes freshly dug with a garden fork.
Grainmills left to right: Grainmaker, Country Living, Corona.
Threshing with the plastic bat method.
Threshing set-up for the foot method.
Wheat (right) is ready to harvest. Rye (left) will be ready a week later.
Tomato juice (left) and tomato soup (right).
Pressure canner (left) and water bath canner (right) with canning jars and two-piece lids.
Dill (sour) pickles fermenting in a gallon jar.
Traditional straight sided crock, hand carved stomper, Harsch crock.
Corn and bags of cowpeas hanging in the barn waiting for shelling.
Corn and cowpeas in the pantry.
Mississippi Silver cowpeas and Bloody Butcher corn in the garden.
Corn sheller in action.
Solar food dryers in the garden.
Inside of solar dryer based on SunWorks design.
Inside of solar dryer based on Appalachian State University design.
8
Rotations and Sample Garden Maps
N OW THAT YOU HAVE AN IDEA when things are going to be in the garden beds, it might be a good time to fill in the crops on your garden map. It would be easy to just decide where your crops go according to height — short ones on the south side and tall ones in the back. I’ve seen some plans like that and I am always left wondering — but what about next year? As far as I’m concerned, garden maps need to show rotation arrows. These are arrows that show where the crops in one bed move to the next year. A garden growing a sustainable diet will have something growing in each bed all twelve months of the year. It is particularly important to make sure the cover crop that is planted in the fall is the crop you want in that bed in the spring.
Height is still a consideration, but when the sun is high in the sky during the summer months, it may not be as much of a problem as you might think. Observe how much of a shadow your tall crops cast at different times during the growing year. My solar food dryers are on the northwest side of a large maple tree. They get plenty of sun until September when the shadow from that tree extends to the dryers. That’s when I move them. If a sun-loving crop were in that spot it would be fine, as long as it was harvested by early September.
You will want a tight rotation. By tight rotation, I mean that when one crop is harvested, the bed is amended with compost and anything else it needs, and the next crop is planted without delay. The easiest way to accomplish that is to have it all decided ahead of time and shown on your garden map. You will know what is planted where and when, and would have bought the seeds well in advance. I will be talking about seeds in Chapter 9 .
In deciding where everything goes, it is important to not plant crops in the same place they were the year before. Different crops require different things from the soil. If you planted everything in the same place every year, the soil would become
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