Abraham... May i ask you what is your background or what are you doing and what are your personal choices in your garden
Sure. I work in an office, and can do some plumbing, licensed gas technician actually. Now I'm doing some
gardening in my free time in a communitary garden that has no water at all. This hard limitation is giving me the chance to experiment. With so many
people that threw the towel (covid fear and lack of water), I have many abandoned lots that I can use. The other people are a little bit surprised that things can grow without irrigating them, and now they are helping me to build more dryland sunken beds. I still don't think crops will endure summer, but I hope to have some yields the other seasons.
But my grandfather was a farmer, so my uncles, and now my father is married to a woman who has an olive orchard. Not an expert, but learning fast. I've been watching
permaculture videos for the last couple of years, and I think I have learned much.
My family did not work like any of that. They did plow the fields, walking over the soil, using the tractor once and again for pretty much everything, and the last time they used organic manure it was thirty years ago. Our
land was terraced, and the earth was very good for almost anything. Sadly, it's alloted for industrial use, so they can farm it no longer.
At least my father has learned to not till his wife's orchard, but he still fumigates (no wonder, it's an olive monocrop in the whole county, Jaén) with the tractor.
None of them know about garden beds such as what we see in
permaculture. Both of them depended on a well for irrigation. So really their
experience is of no help here.
Our garden beds are 120 cm wide and we are planting intensively, trying not to leave gaps between plants. It's hard to get to the middle, especially on the sunken beds, but it's doable. That's the size that Lawton recommends, the bigger the bed, the easier for the food forest to behave like one, also there's more soil you are not passing over. But then I watch farmers videos explaining that this didn't work well for them. While farming they don't want to forage the crops, they just want to come one day and get the harvest and
sell it. So for the farmer, a bed or a row with a monocrop works better in terms of work efficiency: they give the exact nutrients the crops need, the right amount of water at the right time, and once the crop is harvested, the bed is cleaned for the next crop. Also, for the farmer it is easier to remove weeds with a hoe when working in lines.
So that's what I learned. For space efficiency and soil formation wide beds are best, but they are less practical for the farmer needs. Rows are the most efficient in terms of resources and work, but the amount of protected soil is less.
By the way, my last garden bed is a sunked triangle. Not practical at all, I can tell you, but it's a nice shape for a garden and hopefully, it will be our champion at holding humidity. It's just 1,5 sq meters per bed, and it's hard to get to the center. Now I want to seed some onions and lettuces on it, but I have to wait until next rain week.
If you think 90 cm will work for you, go forward. As I said, you can try it, observe watering needs, how well you can manage it, and next year you can change it if you must. Probably your soil will improve with time, and you'll be able to service more beds. If one thing I have learned, is that you learn by doing samples. You can read all the theory you want, ask as many questions as you like, you will not get to understand until you really get your hands dirty. My first bed is not bad, but watching how it performed taught me a lot, so next bed was better. The new one should be even better (maybe not). I know you want a thoroughly plan for your land, but you are not yet in a position to make it. People in this forum usually reccomends a couple of years watching your land and trying things before commiting to a definite plan. Maybe you will want to plant your trees farther away later to let more space for your annuals, but you can't know right now (moving your tree rows is not as easy as moving your market garden beds). And you won't know until you try. Even if you have farming experience, each land is different and takes time to know it.
Yes, 90cm is roughly three lines of crops, but when you consider spacing between plants, you can't plant as much as you think. You can do a test with a planting pattern, that's a round
cardboard with the size of the recommended space for your seedling, to see how many seedlings you can fit in a 90cm wide bed.
So, my personal thoughts are based on the fact that I want to farm and I want to garden... Ideally i want to be doing both at the same time, but let's be practical... what should i consider first?
This comes to preferences, I think I would go first for whatever gives me more immediate benefits. Gardening is excellent for self-consumption, if you are willing to eat what can grow in your land. Farming is best if you know where and how to sell your produce, otherwise you will be another underpaid european farmer. I know I am very bad at selling things, so I'm stuck with gardening :)
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