Handout on Square Foot and Permaculture

Welcome to this exciting event—the first TASIS garden project! This sheet has a little information on our garden plan. We will be combining two different gardening techniques: square foot gardening & permaculture. Square Foot Gardening: Developed by gardener Mel Bartholomew, the basic premise of square foot gardening is to get a lot of bang for your buck. In other words, you get a large diversity and quantity of crops from a relatively small garden bed. The small raised (square) beds are easier to manage and aesthetically pleasing, and the gardener can easily harvest all crops standing outside the planted area, which means the soil (the most important part of a healthy garden) doesn’t get compacted. Healthy Soil: Healthy soil is the base of healthy food. If your soil is sick, your crops will be sick. Many gardeners try to treat problems like bugs and blight with pesticides and herbicides, but the most lasting fix for any crop sickness is to make your soil healthier. Soil is not just dirt that you need to clean out from under your fingernails. Soil is a living organism with over 5000-7000 different species of bacteria per gram. Earth worms are a good indicator of whether or not your soil is healthy. A garden full of worms means the soil is thriving, and a lack of earthworms means that your soil might be dying. We should all be concerned about soil because like fresh water or clean air, there is no magic pill to recreate healthy soil. In fact, it takes up to 500 years to form just 2 centimeters of topsoil. Since we aren’t going to be able to wait 500 years to start our garden, we are going to go with the next best option…sheet mulching the permaculture way! Sheet Mulching the Permaculture Way: Permaculture is a type of agriculture that is modeled on relationships found in nature. The technique was developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. Mollison describes permaculture as "a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature.” We will create a healthy soil base in our square foot gardens by practicing sheet mulching (a “lasagna” of compostable materials). Sheet mulching mimics the process of soil forming in nature in that there is no tilling involved and the layers of organic material decompose to naturally form a fertile soil base. Tilling the land is common practice in most gardens. It is one way to get rid of the weeds and to loosen up compacted soil. Sheet mulch provides weed free, fluffy soil without the tilling, which is better for the soil ecosystem and better for the gardener’s back! Over winter our layers of organic material will mostly decompose, and by spring we should have a healthy soil base where we can plant our seedlings. Our “ Garden Lasagna” recipe: 1. First we will moisten the soil base of our garden and tear down the grass, leaving the clippings in place. 2. Next we will layer down ½ inch or more of overlapping cardboard (this acts as a great weed barrier) & Wet 3. Third we will layer down 10 inches of torn up leaves and wood chips & wet (the key here is that you have a SEEDLESS mulch layer, otherwise you will get weeds in your garden) 4. Fourth we will add on a layer of manure and compost (both pre-made and fruit and veggie scraps we’ve collected). We can continue to add to this layer throughout the next month, so save your banana peels and apple cores! 5. Finally we’ll cover the compost with a thin layer of leaves and wood chips Wait a few months adding biodegradable layers to soil as the soil breaks down and the loft of our lasagna lessens. By spring we should have a healthy base to plant in! A Note On Compostable Materials: While all organic material will eventually break down, some items break down much faster than others, and are less likely to attract hungry animals. For these reasons we will just be adding fresh fruit (except citrus peels, which take a long time to break down), vegetable scraps and seedless yard trimmings to our garden beds. This means apple cores, banana peels, kiwi skins, pepper and tomato cores, vegetable peels, salad scraps without dressing ect. You want to be sure any yard trimmings you add to your compost pile or to your sheet mulch layers are SEEDLESS, otherwise all your work at creating a weed barrier is for naught, because you will introduce weed seeds in your compost. .

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