Choose permanent garden beds and pathways to provide secure habitat for the dynamic soil food web that sustains your crops.
Simple, low-cost framing can be made for your permanent vegetable beds using logs or recycled cedar fence rails. Leaving the ends open makes it
Choose permanent garden beds and pathways to provide secure habitat for the dynamic soil food web that sustains your crops.
Simple, low-cost framing can be made for your permanent vegetable beds using logs or recycled cedar fence rails. Leaving the ends open makes it easier to use a tiller to prepare seed beds.
One of the basic tenets of organic gardening is to put as much effort into improving soil fertility as you put into growing your crops. When you use permanent garden beds and pathways, you can concentrate on building soil in deeply worked beds that will improve over a period of years, all the while growing robust, disease-resistant vegetables. Permanent vegetable beds also make more efficient use of water and fertilizer, and soil compaction is limited to pathways where repeated footsteps can naturally inhibit the growth of weeds.
In the 2008 article Gardening for Keeps, I addressed the practical aspects of designing a garden using permanent beds, pathways and green access corridors (which also produce nutrient-rich grass clippings). In this article, I will cover some benefits of permanent garden beds, plus discuss the invisible soil food web and how you can conserve and enrich the life-forms that create superior soil fertility.
One of the big advantages of working in permanent garden beds is that you can limit some forms of soil compaction. Wet soil is especially prone to compaction because water acts as a lubricant. The first time you step on wet soil, it can become 75 percent compacted. After the fourth step in the same spot, 90 percent of the pore spaces are gone. Soil compaction restricts root growth physically because overly dense soil is often impenetrable, plus it handicaps any roots already present by depriving them of oxygen and access to soilborne nitrogen.
You should always try to avoid stepping on your garden beds, but some operations — such as building trellises or using a broadfork — require standing space. In these cases, you can prevent unnecessary soil compaction by standing on a wide board to distribute your weight. Standing on a board or using boards as walking bridges over garden beds will reduce your body’s ground pressure from about 8 pounds per square inch to less than 1. Just as snowshoes make it possible to walk on snow by distributing your weight, boards, wide steppingstones or flakes of baled hay can help protect permanent vegetable beds from the compaction caused by footsteps.
Surface compaction caused by driving rain also can be troublesome, especially for clay soils. When bare soil is subjected to heavy rain, the larger particles and organic matter often wash away in the mud, leaving behind a surface layer of fine particles that dries into a crust. Organic mulches will cushion the soil from the pressure of heavy rain and protect it from erosion. In situations where you can’t mulch — in a newly seeded bed, for example — use a sheet of burlap or other porous cloth to prevent surface compaction. Row cover tunnels cause raindrops to shatter and disperse before they reach the soil, so such covers prevent surface compaction, too.
Garden experts talk mostly about raised beds, but they are not essential and can be expensive to build. Our point here is that rather than plowing or tilling your entire plot each year, it’s better to lay out and tend permanent areas for dedicated beds and paths. The beds can be raised if you are in a rainy climate, or sunken if your site is dry and windy. Flat beds are also fine, with markers to distinguish the beds from the paths.
If you do choose raised beds, framing is optional. The plants will grow just as well in unframed beds, although you’ll probably need to do a bit of rebuilding each spring. Framing does make the beds look sharp, but lumber for framing can be expensive. Low-cost or free options such as logs or recycled cedar fence rails work fine — just lay them along the long sides of your beds as shown in the Image Gallery. No need to enclose the ends; if you leave them open it will be easier to adjust the beds’ positions if you need to in the future.
Many gardeners like framed garden beds because they can use the frames to support or anchor row covers, plastic, bird netting or other protective covers. For example, pipe brackets installed on the outside of wood-framed raised garden beds can be used to hold the ends of hoops made of wire or plastic pipe, or the ends of wire hoops can be pushed into the ground just inside the frames to provide a firm anchor. The trend toward more extensive use of protective covers is so prominent that many gardeners regard bed framing materials primarily as structural foundations for tunnels or plastic-covered boxes that do the work of small greenhouses.
Every soil has an innate texture based on the size of indigenous soil particles. Clay particles are small, so clay soil feels slippery when wet. Sandy soils have much larger particles, so they feel gritty. The tiny size of clay particles means the spaces between them are small, too. In comparison, the spaces between sand particles are huge. To increase the sponginess of either type of soil and prepare it for the task of growing vegetables, a thorough digging is in order to incorporate spaces for air and organic matter, 