Cultivation Method

The decision on choice of location for a country garden may seem obvious (available sun), but one needs to base the decision on the kind of property (heavily treed to very open), as well as available space. In our case, we didn't need to ponder our site choice for long because we had a 30.foot by 60 foot opening carved out of our 10-acre property.

The orientation was superb for sun exposure during the growing season. How did we know? Simple. Last summer we didn't put in a garden at all being far too busy with renovations - but not too busy to notice where the sun's path was throughout the growing season. We just didn't have enough time to do everything given the renovations were fairly extensive.

The next task was to choose a method of cultivation - whether to till or plow the site. I had thought about renting a tiller but soon forgot about that since we were 50 kilometers from town and did not have a pick up truck to carry the tiller. Thoughts then turned to purchasing a tiller and having it delivered. Tilling was what my father always did so I really didn't think there was any choice needed. Lucky for me, during the winter months, I had time to do some reading on gardening (to start re-building my knowledge base) and was surprised to learn the growing trend in not tilling the earth.

The advantage to not tilling is that the surface layer of organisms is not buried, beneficial fungi and earthworm tunnels are not destroyed. That small bit of knowledge not only made a lot of sense to assist in the natural and beneficial growth, but also saved me a lot of money seeing that I did not have to purchase or rent a tiller.

I decided that raised beds had a definite advantage. Looking around our country property, I scavenged some old 2x4's and 2x6's to create a few raised beds. To kill the grass, and re-use possible landfill waste, I built my raised beds and covered the grass within each with 6 layers of newspaper. I watered the newspaper to begin the decay process and placed some old branches over the beds to prevent the paper from blowing away.

Not wanting to rob any other area on my property of its topsoil, I purchased 16 yards of screened topsoil from a local company. Why so much? That's another part of the on-going story of garden development. I partially filled the raised beds with topsoil (right over the sodden newspaper), added peat moss to each, and then completed the filling of each bed. Now I'm ready to start planting.