New garden space

Hello,

I am developing a new garden space and am not sure how to start it. The space will be roughly 30x40 or similar depending on best layout. Right now the area has decent looking soil, a thick mat of grass and bedrock anywhere from 1 foot to 4 feet underground. Ideally, I want to have it migrate to a no dig system in the near future bit at this point I am not sure how to get there.

Should I tear up the existing grass with a rototiller and plant in the original soil? Grass grows really thick so I think the soil should be decent.

Should I just lay cardboard down and add leaves, compost, soil and straw down and plan in that? Doing this seems like it will cost me around $1000 for the compost, straw, and soil.

Should I do something different? I have lots of sticks leaves etc so can make hugelmounds as the center to my garden beds if it's the best call. I also have lots of rotten trees for wood chips and organic material.

Any ideas are great!!!
I'm growing in zone 3b.

Thats a very big question!
I have some;
- do you have a lot of time
- Do you have the $1000
- Are you in a hurry?
- What do you hope to grow?

John C Daley wrote:Thats a very big question!
I have some;
- do you have a lot of time
- Do you have the $1000
- Are you in a hurry?
- What do you hope to grow?

Yes a big question indeed!

- I have enough spare time likely. Probably 10-20 hours per week to get it started.
Time in regards to seasons is different. We only have about 3 weeks til the first frost but maybe 6 weeks until the snow stays on the ground.

- I prefer not to spend the $1000 as I already need to buy all the fencing for another $1-2000.

-i would prefer to get a good start on it now and be planting this in the spring and early summer.

-i plan on growing regular veggies. Pretty much your standard stuff. Fruit trees will be in another location as a hope to keep bears from destroying the fenced garden.

Hope that helps!

derek kal wrote:The space will be roughly 30x40 or similar depending on best layout.

Sorry, is that in feet? yards? meters?

derek kal wrote:I have lots of sticks leaves etc so can make hugelmounds as the center to my garden beds if it's the best call. I also have lots of rotten trees for wood chips and organic material.

I love hugels. I think they're fun, interesting, and productive. You can also use them to create microclimates. If you have a lot of sticks/logs it's also a great way to sink some carbon while benefiting from it. We have a lot of threads on hugelkultur, a whole forum full. I recommend finding a thread from someone in a similar growing zone and learn from their mistakes and successes.

Edit: It looks like your in the Great White North? I added to that forum as well.

I like the idea of laying down cardboard to kill the grass.  I am not big on using tillers, etc.

I am not big on spending money either.  Are free wood chips, coffee grounds, leaves, and other free stuff available where you are?

I would be more concerned once the cardboard is down on the layout of the garden to take advantage of the sun.

After getting the layout done, I would concentrate on getting a compost pile started.

If you have thick grass and weeds, I'd scythe or mow it off as short as you can, and rake it off to the side. Then lay down cardboard with non-glossy finish and cover it with all that hay, then cover that with sticks from the woods that you're thinning, and cover that with the top layer of duff from the woods. But that's a lot of work. You can trade spending time for spending cash based on how much of each you have available. Also remember, you can do this in 4x40 strips, or even smaller, one bed at at time instead of trying to tackle the whole damn garden at once.

Hi Derek,
I may be in the minority when it comes to rototilling. I am not a fan of using it regularly, but I have no problem using it to establish a new garden site. Here is my suggestion if everything was perfect. in my opinion, cardboard is not bad, but not needed, if you till the soil first.

This fall:
Rent a tiller and till up the area
Get a bunch of organic cow (or rabbit or horse) manure and then till that in as well.
Scatter some agricultural molasses
Scatter some dried seaweed (not thick, but well covered)
Add a layer of at least 2-3 inches of fall leaves
Add a layer of at least 4-5 inches of wood chips

Then let it sit all winter. In the spring as things warm up, the soil will be alive with microbes and worms. In zone 3b... a thick layer of mulch can result in a delay in the soil warming up. You can use plastic to help warm things up faster, or rake off the mulch, let the soil warm, and then add it back.

If I can't or don't want to do all of that, then I would do what you can. You could just till the soil this fall to break up the grass and let the winter rot the sod. Then in the spring give it another till to fluff it up some and kill any early weeds. Keep in mind that you are going to need either a lot of time to weed or a source of mulch/compost if you want to continue doing no-till in the future. You can get to where there are not as many weeds, but in reality you will need to be adding mulch and/or compost each year to keep the weeds at bay.

I am developing a new garden space and am not sure how to start it.

First: WATER. Think how do you capture and store water. Have at least a couple of sources.
Second: CLIMATE. Study what is good for your piece of land in the Earth.
Third: SOIL. Test it. You need to know if it's sandy or clayey, and how much organic matter it has.
Water availability, climate and soil determine what species you can grow, so select them accordingly. The more suitable plans are to your terrain, the less effort and the more rewarding.

Next step is knowing how frequently you can attend the garden, if it's your zone 1 (kitchen garden, visit daily), 2  or 3. Tender plants that require daily attention only can be grown in zone 1, for example.

Next is deciding any growing technique. We reccomend anything that keeps your soil alife, but if you are new, just copy whatever you know that works for your area until you know more about growing plants. All the techniques above sound good to me if you want to try.
Growing techniques include: polyculture, intercropping, etc.

Things are a little different in zone 3b. I think Matt's approach has merit.

I suspect that cardboard and mulch will accomplish very little when frozen solid over the long winter, and will hold the frost longer in spring. It will break down, but that will take until next fall.

If you plan to garden in spring, I think you will need to take aggressive measures right away to chew up the living sod layer. You will probably only have to go 2" deep, so most of the soil structure can be preserved if you wish.

A 30'x40' plot is pretty big to do by hand. It can be done with a sharp shovel, but personally I think it's not an efficient use of time and energy. A rototiller, set very shallow, does the job quite well.

Often you can hire someone with a tractor mounted rototiller, which may be easier to control depth-wise provided that you are adamant with the operator about exactly what you want done -- just chew up the top 2" and no deeper. If you are lucky, this person will also have a 3-point hitch mounted cultivator (narrow tines) to rip things a little deeper while not disturbing the soil structure excessively.

Anyway, that's what I would do. Hope this is helpful.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:I suspect that cardboard and mulch will accomplish very little when frozen solid over the long winter, and will hold the frost longer in spring. It will break down, but that will take until next fall.

That's a good point. I'm happy with the cardboard and hay/wood mulch routine in my 3b garden, but for the first year, at planting time, I do have to scoop out a pocket of mulch, dump a few shovels of mature compost in its place and seed/transplant into that. The following year, the cardboard is mostly gone and I'm good to go.

Christopher Weeks wrote: I'm happy with the cardboard and hay/wood mulch routine in my 3b garden, but for the first year, at planting time, I do have to scoop out a pocket of mulch, dump a few shovels of mature compost in its place and seed/transplant into that. The following year, the cardboard is mostly gone and I'm good to go.

Hmm, interesting! I hadn't considered that approach (6' frostline here) but it's worthy of an experiment. Thanks for the idea!

These suggestions have been a great help so far! Permies people are the best!

My plan and next steps are going to be tilling the top few inches of soil and then covering it with leaves for the winter. In the spring I plan to rake the leaves and allow the ground to thaw out then cover with sticks and branches, then cardboard, leaves, mulch and compost/soil. I hope to get a mid season crop in next year as long as things go well!

I am also hoping all you wonderful people can help me with my permaculture start. My property is 10 acres with about 1 acre of cleared land which includes the house, garage, driveway, septic field, well, and some outbuildings. I would like to take this 1 acre and make it a lot more productive. I have no interest in mowing the acre of land all summer. My hope is to add the garden space in the middle of the driveway, a firepit area, and a hottub patio but this all amount to only a small section of the land.

I have dozens of deer who call the property their home and I love to see them, but they will cause major issues when starting to build up my food forest/permaculture property. I don't really want to fence in the whole space because that means I have to add gates on the driveway and would take away from the general appeal. I also want to see the deer as they are gorgeous and often give birth near by. Has anyone found a nice medium between wildlife like deer and your garden space?

Along the same lines is bears. We don't have grizzlies but do have black bears which will come every so often. Because of this, I want to keep my fruit trees away from the general garden so that the bear doesn't destroy the fence and whole garden on its way to the fruit. This, however, defeats the benefits of guilds within a garden setting.

I feel like this was a long rant but I hope it gives a bit of insight and hope someone has been in a similar situation and had a partial solution!

Hi. If you take a look at Toby Hemmenway's "Gaia's Garden", you can see how he addressed this topic of deer.
Basically, he diverted the wildlife by planting things beast like to eat, following a path that leads them far away from the market garden, since most of them are just passing by and eating what they find in their path.

Another option might be cutting out "squares" or small sections of your existing grass/turf, lifting them, and then turning them upside down back in the same spot.   If you don't mind the  time/ manual labor.   Sort of exposing the roots to air/cold and composting the whole section in place right on top of the soil you don't want to expose or destroy.