Brett L. Markham - Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre

Ashworth, S. Seed to seed

Bartholomew, M. Ca$h from square foot gardening

Bartholomew, M. Square foot gardening

Bradley, F. Rodales garden answers

Bubel, N. The new seed starters handbook

Campbell, S. Let it rot!

Coleman, E. Four season harvest and The new organic grower

Deppe, C. Breed your own vegetable varieties

Ellis, B.; Bradley, F. The organic gardeners handbook of natural insect and disease control

Gooch, B. The ultimate guide to squirrel hunting

Grounds, R. The natural garden

Jeavons, J. How to grow more vegetables

Jenkins, J. The humanure handbook

Johnson, J.; Johnson, M. Successful small game hunting: Rediscovering our hunting heritage

Kains, M. Five acres and independence

Macher, R. Making your small farm profitable

Mercer, L. Storeys guide to raising poultry

Pangman, J. Chicken coops

Richey, D. The ultimate guide to deer hunting

Schwenke, K. Successful small scale farming

Intensive agricultural techniques, and their productivity compared to traditional row gardening methods, have been well documented in the past several decades, and certain methods have been used for centuries. They all share a number of common characteristics.

All of the intensive methods use raised beds and grow vegetables much more closely than traditional row methods and therefore require less landthus requiring less water and labor while reducing the need for weeding. Intensive gardens produce the same amount of food in 20% of the space or even less than that, leading to greatly reduced costs.

Traditional row gardening is one-dimensionalthat is, a straight line. A small furrow is dug with a hoe, and seeds are sprinkled in from a packet. After the seeds germinate, the farmer goes back down the row and thins plants to the recommended spacing. Each row takes its own space, plus space for walking paths on either side, and the walking paths become compacted under foot traffic. The entire arearows and pathsis watered and fertilized. Because the rows are exposed to the drying effects of sun and wind on both sides, mulching is required to conserve water and prevent weeds. The typical 100-foot row takes up at least 300 square feet of space. As a basis of comparison, the expected yield of carrots for that row is about 100 pounds.

Row gardens adapted from commercial agriculture are wasteful of space and resources on a home scale.

In contrast, intensive mini-farming is three-dimensional. Seeds are planted in the raised bed using within-row spacings in all directions, giving a two-dimensional space, and crops such as pole beans are grown on trellises, adding a third dimension. This vastly increases the quantity of a given crop that can be produced per unit area. In the case of carrots, a garden bed 4 feet wide and 6 feet long (24 square feet) will yield 100 pounds of carrots. Thats the theoretical yield, but in practice Ive found 32 square feet are required to get a full 100 pounds. Still, thats an amazing increase in space efficiency! Using trellising and pole beans instead of bush beans and indeterminate (vining) tomatoes instead of determinate (bush) tomatoes will also increase the yield per plant.

Using row gardening, the farmer has to fertilize, mulch, weed, and water 300 square feet of space to get 100 pounds of carrots. But by using raised beds and intensive gardening techniques that use close spacing, the farmer has to fertilize and water only 24 square feetless than 1/10 the space and thus less than 1/10 the fertilizer and water. The cost savings are immense, and the intensive farmer can also dispense with mulching, because the plants are growing so closely together that they shade each others stems and the ground, conserving moisture and shading out weeds. The shade provided by growing plants closely is also helpful in protecting beneficial soil microbes from the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Last season I kept records of how much weeding was required per 100 square feet averaged across crops as diverse as broccoli and tomatoes, and because of the living mulch aspect of intensive gardening, less than 30 minutes per season were required per 100 square feet.

There are three schools of thought regarding the spacing of plants in intensively planted beds. The Grow Biointensive method recommends a hexagonal pattern using various sorts of hexagonal and triangular jigs. The Square Foot method recommends using a grid of squares dividing every square foot into a number of subsquares appropriate to the spacing of the crop being grown. My own method is to plant a properly spaced row, go up the distance within a row, and then plant seeds in parallel.

Carrots planted intensively in a raised bed yielded 100 pounds in just 32 square feet.

A little analysis yields a few facts. The Grow Biointensive method actually fits more vegetables into the same space compared to the other two, but for most vegetables the difference is 10% or less. Offsetting this advantage is the fact that the Grow Biointensive planting method is painstaking and that the average person interested in farming isnt about to envision a hexagon as being composed of a series of equilateral triangles. However, this process will increase yields for a farmer handy enough to set up the proper jigs to make the planting process easy. The jigs are plywood triangles composed of three 60-degree angles and with all three sides the same length as the planting distance between each plant of each different crop. A seed is planted at each of the three points.