Intensive Organic Gardening - How To Double Food Production In Your Garden

Here's a simple idea to increase greatly the planting area of your organic garden. It helps you raise a lot more vegetables the natural gardening way, along with little fruits and salads for less work: Here's an organic Lazy Barrow - with handles!

Make a pile about four foot broad by five foot long and four foot deep from any woody, degradable material. Twigs, little branches, old logs, bushy stems, briars, sawdust, the roots of shrubs... whatever comes to hand.

The ground dimensions are not significant, as long as you build the hill as high as possible. Intersperse the fibrous stuff every two or three inches with rough soil, and a lot of fresh compost if available. Form the surface of the pile using good soil into a big wall with sloping sides as well as a flat top.

If you look at the flanks as well as top part of this barrow you'll find that they amount to almost twice the planting region of the base.

It's a good plan to maintain the soil in place with pieces sliced from the lawn (turves) and turned over. You could slice them from any meadow. They'll hold the hill in good shape and rapidly rot down into great compost. Failing which, hessian sacking, burlap, carpets of organic material, old trousers, fishing nets or thick fabrics might be tethered around the flanks to prevent soil erosion. You might still insert plants into gaps made in the shroud.

We have a 'Wayland's Smithy'

We now have a model of the well known Wayland's Smithy, that extended tumulus on England's ancient Ridgeway which was the cemetery of Bronze Age warriors. We could grow virtually anything in the sides of this tumulus. Large plants that sink very deep roots could be set at the apex. The roots will discover all the depth they need without risk of being impeded by impacted soil or stones below.

A lazy idea for organic vegetable growing

As we develop the hill, insert into it many sturdy upright staves so they stick out at least one foot above the soil. The gardener will find these valuable later for support while they lean across to pick edible plants from the apex of the barrow without pressing and compressing the soil. Gardeners in the 19th century erected vertical strawberry beds six foot high using this idea. However, they erected ziggurats: a complex system of steps of diminishing size, on top of the other and each one making a separate bed.

Introducing the Lazy Pyramid

We could readily perfect a Lazy Barrow into a Lazy Pyramid as the Aztecs did. We just make the mound into a rough pyramid. At the bottom are your toughest degradable things, after which come successive tiers of friable stems. Overlay the slanted sides with turves to stop rain washing away the soil.

Pyramids have no benefit over Lazy Barrows, however they will amuse speculative writers in time to come with evidence that a connection once existed between your own garden plus South America.

A Lazy Barrow is actually the ultimate raised bed for intensive organic gardening. It can give us up to double the planting surface of its ground area. We might raise plants that need bright sun or depth for deep roots near the apex or on the southern as well as western slopes, in the manner of a herb spiral. Shade-tolerant plants like cabbages or kale may be grown around the northern as well as eastern sides then bog-loving plants like celery and cress might be set about the perimeter where they will enjoy the run-off of rainfall.

Waste wood becomes nutritious compost

A further benefit of a Lazy Barrow is that it gets rid of otherwise long-persistent shrubby materials. Following a few years, we might level the mound and at its centre will now be well-rotted mulch, fit to grow potatoes or any other robust plant. So if we must get rid of big quantities of clippings and dead wood, and you can't burn them, create Lazy Barrows - and grow something in them!