Permaculture Vegetable Garden

For background, I am a huge believer in the concept of "do a ton of work now so you don't have to do very much ever again" and I apply it to my work at my job and on the farm. For example, I have spent the last two full business days trying to write a VBA script to update a VLOOKUP function in a sheet so that I don't have to do it every month. So when I started to look into how I wanted to set up a vegetable garden, I was obviously very smitten with the permaculture designs. Use the land and elements you have available to you. Plant things next to other things that help them both grow well. Don't fuck up your soil by digging it up; what if you just added piles of The Good Dirt™ filled with Worm Friends® and other Helpful Bugs©?? I'm sold.

And, because I have an unhealthy addiction to spreadsheets, I obviously had to get started by organizing in a spreadsheet. Charles and I marked out the space we wanted, an approximately 24' x 48' rectangle, and got to work.

Check out the red "V"s for where our corners are - tough to see but I wasn't climbing on the roof for a better angle, sorry!

First step: figure out what vegetables we want to grow. This took longer than I expected just to narrow down the vegetable itself, then I spent WAY too many hours going through a seed catalog my dad brought down last time my parents visited to choose which variety of each vegetable we wanted. 20 vegetables, 2 fruits, and 28 separate varieties of seeds later, we were ready to really plan the garden. I spent hours reading about companion planting (i.e., which vegetables grow well together and which you should never plant near each other) and separated my 28 varieties into six groups, then roughly plotted the six groups so the "not friends" vegetables wouldn't be next to each other.

Okay, cool, progress made. Next, I wanted to figure out how much space everything needed. Could I fit all my vegetables in my 24' x 48' plot? Did I have lots of extra room? I separated out my vegetables in a new sheet and went to work researching how much space each plant should have, how many seeds were in a packet, and took that to Photoshop to block out the approximate layout.

The yellow highlights in column H mean that the packet, if the seeds sprouted at the rate the company anticipates (about 85% success rate), would require that much square footage, but I didn't want to plant that much. Blueberries and strawberries are red highlighted because the seed catalog didn't have what I wanted so I ended up picking those up at Sam's Club as started plants.

Next, we have my Photoshop approximate plan. Each box is approximately the square footage required for each vegetable (to scale to my 24' x 48' scaled overall garden rectangle), and each layer is named its approximate dimensions so I have something to reference when I actually get to planting. I couldn't fit all my labelled layers in there, so you'll just have to take my word for it. The gray is my walking path, and my black speckles are going to by my cattle panel vine arches. I follow a kick-ass lady on Instagram who inspired me to try the cattle panel method - her account is @cupofjolene, and her motto is seriously incredible:

Raise your own meat - Grow your own garden - Mind your own business. -@cupofjolene

These are the cattle panel vine arches:

She uses them mostly for gourds, I'll be using them for zucchini, summer squash, little round squashes, cucumbers, peas, and green beans. This will be a win/win/win for me, because I get to go to Tractor Supply to get the cattle panels and oh might as well check out the chicks while I'm there...(win 1) It also will provide me with shade and a cool spot to hang out in the garden (win 2) while also making sure my vegetables, especially the squash and cucumbers, don't rot in the ground before they fully ripen (win 3). I suppose there's a fourth win mixed in here, too - it looks AWESOME!

Alrighty, seeds planned, the garden size/shape is gonna work out nicely, time to get to the dirt! I'm going with a no-dig garden, meaning I add to my soil but don't till it or take anything out. I have very heavy clay soil around here, which can be a tough gardening material. We used horse compost and just put it directly on top of our grass. The underlying grass will die, decompose, and add nutrients to the garden, while the somewhat fluffy (well, relative to the basically-cement clay) compost layer gives good room and its own nutrients to the plants. Some people put a cardboard or newspaper (both unprinted varieties, ideally) on top of the compost as a light blocker to help kill off any weeds. After that, mulch goes on top to contain the moisture and assist in light blocking for weed prevention. The theory goes that throughout your years, you leave some rotted veggies behind and swap your crop location occasionally to replenish nutrients. For example, beans and legumes are great at adding nitrogen back to soil, and corn/tomatoes tend to suck nitrogen out of the soil, so swapping your beans and tomatoes every other year can help keep balanced soil.

First layer of compost down, with my ever-helpful gardening pal Willow.

We added another layer of compost, opted to skip the weed-barrier-cardboard layer and found a guy on Facebook with free mulch. Apparently, there's a local tree company that will accept names to a mulch list, and whenever they build up enough mulch from their wood chipping, they'll dump a load off at the next person on the list. My newfound Facebook friend apparently was not told what amount of mulch he would receive, and has "approximately six truckloads" of extra mulch after using as much as he could all over his property. "Just come grab as much as you want! I'll help you shovel!", he says, and Charles and I head over. We filled the truck, which ended up covering about 3/4 of the compost, and we went back a few days later to grab the rest.

Now that the soil is down (read: we don't need to use the tractor or the truck to access the garden) we can put the fence up. We ended up deciding on a 6' fence of black coated chicken wire with T-posts to hold the edges. The fence is going to extend one or two feet (depending on how much extra fencing we have) out at the base to prevent anything from digging into it. I don't love the green-with-white-tips coloring of the T-posts, so those were spray painted black to match the fence.

We needed a gate, and with the combination of our self-imposed quarantine for coronavirus, desire to not spend extra money, and environmental inspiration to reuse as much as possible, we decided on using a stall door. Charles' barn used to have six stalls in it, and now it has three as he expanded his workspace, which means we have some extra stall doors lying around. There are several problems with just taking a stall door and slapping it onto a garden fence:

1. Stall doors are heavy AF and need a LOT of support to be held up (seriously, it's a two person job to move the doors)

2. They are sliding doors, meant to be hung on a top rail that's usually supported by the rest of the stall front (something that gardens do not have)

3. They are 7' tall and 4' wide, and we really only need a 30" wide door, and the fence is 6' tall.

4. They are not typically weatherproof as they're intended to be inside a barn, and the bottom half is solid wood which can be an issue in windy areas like ours.

Luckily, these are all very solvable problems. The stall door is essentially a metal frame bolted onto some wood pieces, so we undid all the fasteners to remove the wood. Now, we can cut the wood down to the width we want, and we used a Japanese technique called Shou Sugi Ban to weatherproof (and make the color fit a little better with our black fence) the wood. This is fun for many reasons, but mostly that you get to use a torch and lightly burn some wood! Technically, Shou Sugi Ban is on cedar planks, which already have a bit more weather resistance than the pine boards we're using, but hey, close enough.

The process is simple: light a torch, and lightly burn your boards with them. You don't actually want to see flames lingering on your boards after you move the torch away–we're not trying to let the wood KEEP burning here. Do one "coat" of burning, then use a wire brush to remove any loose charred pieces. Repeat until you're close to "total coverage" of the burning (no piece left unburned) and sand the wood down to a smooth surface (but don't sand down to remove all your burned wood!). Burn again, sand again, until you're satisfied that you have a full burned coverage and no bits coming off. Once the boards are burned on all sides, set them aside.

Here is a video of the technique:

The metal on the stall doors is all silver, and I have no idea if it's galvanized or rust-proofed at all. We bought Rustoleum enamel spray to keep the T-posts in good condition (and also to make them black to match the fence), so we'll use that here as well. We scrubbed down the residual dirt/grime that collected on the metal over the years, and once dry, spray painted everything. After the paint dries, we can reassemble the stall door. Remember how heavy and not-wind-friendly the original door is? We're going to add some gaps to the wood portion to alleviate both issues, and add chicken wire on the back (under the metal framing for looks and security) to prevent critters from using the convenient garden-access gaps.

Here's my before picture of the stall door we'll use, and my "after" picture. The stall door isn't finished, but I'm a very visual person, so I took to Photoshop to get my idea to paper, so to speak. The final "render" doesn't show the chicken wire that we'll be adding, but you get the idea, at least:

The final problem to address is the sliding door issue. The simplest solution is that we bought gate hinges. Theoretically, we could have built a system to hang the sliding door, but it would require more concrete-set 4x4 fence posts, and a system to strengthen the top bar, and overall just be a pain in the ass.

Currently, our to-do list vs completed list is a little more balanced than when we started, but still have a looooong way to go!

To Do:

• Finish putting the chicken wire up (we put one section up, so the front left wall has 4' of wire and a 2' gap to the ground...)

• Dig a small trench around the outside of the garden to allow us to bury wire out from the edge, preventing bunnies/groundhogs/moles/mice/etc from digging in.

• Finish the gate - Shou Sugi Ban is nearly completed, but a connector broke on our propane tank, which means we're unable to move the hose to another tank and the tank it's stuck on is empty, so that's on a temporary hold until our replacement order arrives. - Cut the metal edges of the stall door remnants to be the right size for the new dimensions. - Finish spray-painting the metal after I cut it. - Assemble and hang the gate

• In the second week of May, transplant the seedlings we started inside and plant the seeds that are started directly outside.

• Get, bend, and place our cattle panel arches.

• "Assemble" tomato cages (I ended up just buying welded wire fencing, which I'll cut and form into the right shape, since it was $50 to make 32 cages ($1.56/cage) instead of buying them for $2.78/each at Lowe's.)

Completed:

• Create seed plan of what seeds go where, when each need to be planted.

• Build compost layer and mulch layer according to our seed plan.

• Sink fence posts (T-posts for majority, concrete set 4x4 for gate posts).

• Start first batch of seedlings.

I guess if I wanted to fill out my "Completed" list, I could add all the planning aspects and include how many throwaway ideas we went through. I do like to make incredibly specific lists to make myself feel more accomplished...

Anyway, this has been a long post with no completed project, so I'll share with you our baby curly kale seedlings' progress at 3, 4, and 5 days post-planting:

May 10th is our last frost date down here, so that's also our deadline to finish the project. Can we do it in 30 days??? I'll let you know, but hopefully yes. Are you growing a garden? What did you choose to put in it, and do you have any expert tips you want to share?