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Lawn into veg with the minimum effort. A permaculture "easy-start" program for absolute beginners who think they don't have the time to change their world.

 

 

Every year we spend hours and money on maintaining a nice short lawn, and in the worst of cases we have lawns that no one is actually allowed to walk on, often surrounded by nice thick hedges of dark and poisonous lorrel or lilandae so that no one can look at them either. Did you ever stop to wonder what this says about our relationship with the land on which we live?

 

The financial net is tightening every day, wages and job security are dropping while prices and taxes are forever going up. What if the solution was in the lawn?

 

When we look at the food security question straight in the face, its enough to bring on a panic attack. Most "developed"  countries have enough food to last......about two weeks if there is asudden embargo or other disturbance to the global distribution network.

 

But food security today goes beyond being able to fill your cupboards. Modern food security also means that the food you are eating isn't going to give you cancer and kill you very neatly just before you reach retirement.

 

You can look at the whole situation and feel pretty small and insignificant against a net of such an intense weave. What I want to do today is to show you where your scissors are, and how to cut the first string.

 

From there on, you'll figure out not only how to cut other strings, but how to start weaving your own lifeweb. This will be a stable lifeweb that you control, one that is linked to your neighbourhood, to your house, to your land and especially to nature.

 

If you are already mowing and strimming more than 150m2 of lawn  you already have nearly all you need to put my technique into practice. The energy audit is already balanced, you ALREADY have the time and the money to do this. But even if you have less space,  the technique is still viable. It will be up to you to scale it up or down to your own needs and resources.

 

We're going to turn your lawn into "strips of veg." One strip at a time and a few species at a time. Your knowledge and confidence will grow side by side with your garden, as will the dent in your food budget.

 

Don't give up yet, we're going to do it low energy. No annual digging, not much watering and hardly any weeding. This will require a bit of commitment but not self induced slavery. The energy you gain in the longterm will be more than the energy spent.  

 

This fair deal with nature will create you a SEED ECONOMY.

 

This seed economy will only grow larger as time goes on and not only by reinvesting your saved energy in clever little home made systems. Food prices will continue to rise, so you'll definitely be immunising yourself against inflation, probably against cancer.

 

Sooner or later you'll have either the time and or the money to change your heating over to a sustainable method where YOU can provide the calories yourself from YOUR environment. And why not fit out your house with an autonomous water system, or take the time to help build community resource projects or join local produce networks. This may sound like utopian propoganda, and that's because...IT IS!

In this photo you can see an old strip garden that I put in on a tiny plateau between two mountains.

 

Each of the fifteen strips is growing something different. I used to come here just once a week and spend a day looking after it all and harvest my veggies for the week.

Have a zoom and look closely. 

Our first four primary natural needs are air, water, food, shelter and warmth. Take a look at where yours' come from?

All our primary needs have been neatly monopolised and polluted by our friendly international consumerist mafia while we were watching the A Team on Sunday afternoons.

To top it all we are paying for them to poison us and ruin the planet at the same time.

When you do an energy audit of your current life situation, you'll find that about 80% of YOUR OWN energy is being harnessed by the economic net and that the money it gives you in exchange is leaving you less and less options.

On with the solution...

We'll be growing in strips so as to avoid walking on the soil in which we grow our food.

 

He who compacts the soil needs to decompact it every year. Remember, this is about saving energy not creating more work. Keep that in the forefont of your mind.

 

Not only does strip gardening save effort,  it is just nicer to walk out in light shoes or barefoot onto nice lawn paths and do your gardening in a mud free zone.

 

Children can play chase between beds and, in my experience, all but the most exciteable dogs learn the difference between paths and beds within a few days.

 

It also creates us a little system in which we can easily plan our crops, and it is much more heartening to do the work needed in little bites. A whole mature bed can be weeded, worked over, planted and mulched in about half an hour. The senasation of having completed a whole bit if the garden is much better than staring out of the window trying to find excuses not to go dig or weed that big old plot. A big plot is an endless and thankless task.

On this reasonably flat piece of land, we laid our beds out so as to be seen from the sky. Kids absolutely love it, although the second year i was regretting not having put it "on contour" during a long drought.

Below is a first year strip bed with carrots planted ontop of the mulch. Manouch understood the rules of the garden within half a day.

Ideally we want to be downhill from the house or other roof (for water harvesting and distribution)  and in a sunny spot. Go take a look at your garden and try to find the best patch of lawn to transform based on these criteria.

 

The width of the strips needs to be such that you can reach the middle from either side, without walking on the soil and without ruining your back.  That will be between 1m20 and 1m80. You can find the width by kneeling down and leaning forward with a brick in one hand, you can support your weight with the other hand, and you need to measure the distance from your knees to where you can comfortably place AND pick up the brick; then double it.

 

If your lawn is on a definite slope, you'll want to make a contour level to trace the strips 'on contour.' This will help in the futur with water efficiency. If your lawn is really dead flat, you'll maybe want to look at other formes like keyholes or leaf patterns.

The timing of applied technique is essentiel. My easy-start programme has been worked out to get the best result with the least work. If you do any less than i'm suggesting, this doesn't work. If you do it later than I recommend, the workload goes up. Trust me i've tried!

Here in order: Filling a big bag through the legs, side view of how to attach the big bag to your belt or pockets, an hour in the public picnic area and i have several big bags full, laying out hay bales to make flower forms on flat ground,  bails shaken out, shaken out hay spread to required bed width, overview of a fifteen bed garden being laid out, as seen from google earth

In december, mark out out your first bed with some mini stakes and string, then cover the area with a 30cm layer of biomass. Biomass is organic matter. In the case of a lawn, the best and most adapted biomass for a first dose is hay.

 

If you think finding hay is too difficult a task, you could just stop mowing for a season and strim your own biomass in high summer. That is pure permaculture! If not hay, dead leaves are freely available in most suburban areas during the autumn. You can mix them with mower clippings. I let my grass grow to about 10cm high and spread leaves lightly over a wide area before hoovering up the lot with the mower. This gives a great mixture of carbon and nitrogen to get the soil alive and producing humus again.

 

Covering the lawn with this heavy mulch will kill off the grass and stimulate soil life. The soil life organismes will start a riot of eating, pooping, digging and tunelling. If you kept your soil mulched like this for about 5 years you will end up with perfect growing soil. However, with a little effort and some clever organising we can speed that up to three years, and get ourselves some vegetables while we're at it.

Make a note of the surface area of your bed, and between december and february try to get your hands on some pre rotted manure. You'll need 1 barrow per 4m2. It can be cow, horse, chicken, rabbit or even just year old dry toilet mix from your own household.

 

In february its time to open the soil and add some manure. Take the mulch from the first metre of the bed, transport it in a barrow to the other end and dump it on the lawn there. Underneath what you've removed you'll find nearly no more grass, but lots of earthworms and other soil organisms already at work.

 

You need to open the soil by sticking a good garden fork in the ground to full depth and then pull the handle back 45 degrees. No digging, no tilling, just crack it open as much as possible. You'll hear a ripping sound coming from the dying network of grass roots. Instead of fighting all that grass or cutting it away to leave bare mineral soil, we're just suffocating the life into it. Feeding the soil its old protective cover before it starts to eat the new one we just added.

 

Now add a few forks of manure (and a handful of crushed oyster shells if in a calcium deficient area. To know if your soil is calcium deficient ask a neighbour who grows food if they have to add lime to get good cauliflowers.)

 

Once all the additives are laid on the soil, take the mulch from the next metre and dump it on the square you just opened up and repeat the process. Continue like that all the way down the bed. When you get the the end, the mulch you dumped there at the beginning will be waiting for you to cover the last square with. NOW THAT was as energy efficient as it could be. 90% of the mulch was moved in one movement and not two, and the soil is already much easier to open up than if you were attacking a healthy lawn with a spade. The soil life will now be able to burrow deeper and faster, and water will get down into the soil and remain there for longer than in tilled bare soil.

Above in order : Pulling off the mulch to find grass free soil, staggered rows of nests in the mulch, a seed potato in the nest, the light covering needed, the young plant pushing up through, secondary mulch with grass cuttings, plants in full autonomous health, plants in flower, harvest day.

 

Below in order : Cross sction of soil in December, cross section of soil during forking procesn in february, cross section of soil with nests open in the mulch, cross section of soil with seeds planted, cross section of soil with fully healthy autonomous plants.

Now in this bed we're going to grow some potatoes. Potatoes are big weed killers, and they grow very nicely IN BETWEEN the soil and the mulch. However, potato seed doens't like cold wet conditions, and under your mulch it is both cold and wet. It is therefore time to open up little nests in the mulch, 45cm apart.

 

You should get 3 rows in a bed by staggering the holes, again, more simple efficiency but this time  by applying a PATTERN. These nests will warm up during february and march, and in mid march (depending on local climate of course) you can drop a seed potato in each nest and cover it over with a sprinkled handful of mulch.

 

By the time you need to get the lawn mower out again, the potato plants will be poking their heads up through the mulch. You can empty your grass box onto the bed, to make a 4cm blanket of grass clippings over the original mulch. Take care  not to suffocate the potato plants though. You should leave a nice 10cm wide hole around each. The grass cuttings layer is also important. It stops light getting through to the potatoes and turning them green.

Thats it folks! The first year's work is done. There is enough water in the bed to stand up to all but the dryest hottest climates. Rule of thumb should be, if you have to water the lawn, water the potatoes. If you do have to water, its better to drench the bed with 20l per m2 of a night time, taking care not to wet the potato leaves. That should keep it going for a good ten to fifteen days. If it rains regulary in your region, you have literally no more work to do.

 

When the leaves start to get big brown spots on them,  you can rip them off being careful  not to pull the spuds up with them. Leave the leaves in a pile at one end of the bed.  The big brown spots are what we call blight. It is a rampaging fungus that attacks potatoes and tomatoes. If the spores get to drip down onto the potatoes they won't keep. Your soil is also infected so no more potatoes or tomatoes in this bed for the next five years.

 

Within the  next ten days, check the weather and try to find a nice clear sunny day. If you have no blight, you will need to clear at least some space by mid july just by eating delicious new potatoes. Get up early (with the sun) and go out to your potato bed. Peel back the mulch and pile it up at one end of the bed. You should find a good amount of potatoes sitting on rich dark lively soil. Scrabble about a bit to get them all out and lined up in the sun on one edge of the bed. Some may have been munched by slugs, ants, mice or gophers. These can be washed and eaten within the next week or so. For all the good ones, leave them out in the sun.

 

Go back indoors and call in sick at work, then, after a good breakfast, take your garden fork and go poke the soil about again, no turning it over, just poking and lifting, just like the last time. The earthquake effect that you created last time should begin to fall away into smaller clumps. The cracking PATTERN will become denser as the soil becomes lighter

 

You can work one half of the bed, wait till lunchtime and turn the potatos over, putting them on the side you have worked. A day in the sun bakes the skin slightly and makes them storeable in big paper sacks. As the shade of late afternoon creeps in, you can work the other half of the bed,  bag up the potatoes and...if this is your very first bed and it is on contour, keep reading, if it is bed 2 or any other subsequent bed and you are refreshing your memory,  skip the next paragraph.

Digging a Swale.

 

Now time for some physical work. A one off event that will save you literally a lifetime of watering. It is time to turn this bed into a swale and berm.That means digging a trench (swale) along the high side and piling up soil and mulch in long mound on the low side (berm). If you are in a wet climate with sandy or well draining soil, a small trench no wider or deeper than your spade is fine. If you are in a clay soil or a climate with long dry summers and heavy rain events, it may need to be three spades wide and one and a half deep or bigger. The rule of thumb is simple. If the swale overflows, it wasn't big enough.

 

Digging this will be alot easier having already done the potato thing. It was all carefully planned.  I'm on free draining mixed soil, it takes me about an hour to dig a 20m swale this way. It may be easier and not so expensive to hire someone to do this if you are not used to this kind of work.  As you create the berm, you can spill over onto the grass on the low side. Lay a carpet of new mulch first, pile soil ontop, add the potato stems and weeds then cover with the old mulch as a topcoat. This little linear system will collect rain water and you can even throw in a pipe from your guttering overflow.

 

It is a horizontal linear soakaway hydrating the land on which you will be growing your crops. This way as you go down the hill bed by bed in the futur, the land will have water underneath already. By planting deep rooted perenial plants and woody perenial bushes, plus live soil full of mushroom hyphae, will give your beds access to this underground water.

 

Once the digging is done, you can plant up the berm.  I would suggest planting it up with perenials. If the swale is at the top of a south facing (we're talking northern hemisphere) slope I'd recommend trees. I'm on a north facing slope so for me its low bushes, mainly redcurrants. Get some  redcurrant cuttings from a friend or neighbour's redcurrant bushes in late August. (30cm cuttings planted in stations 10 at a time in august) plant them at then end of the berm while they root out and become bush saplings.  You will be able to replant them next march. In the mean time grow leeks and fennel anyway (see below) but less of them.  In february separate the redcurrants out and plant at 50cm intervals with peas or broad beans in a thick row either side. Start off a few squash plants in pots and plant them on the berm after the last frosts. Once the peas and beans are harvested, slash down the greenery and mulch with it, the squash will quickly invade the remaining space. You will be able to fill the opportunities on the berm thereafter.

Here in order: My children marking the contour line with an A level, healthy autonomous potato plant, soil after potato treatment, a freshly dug swale and berm, one year later the mulched berm is planted with trees bushes and support species ready to become a hedge, overview of five swales used as structure for my "hens' heaven" ( rotating pasture chicken food forest).

Continuation of a normal strip bed...the day of the potato harvest.

The same day, you will need a load of young leeks. The first year you can buy them from a nursery. You have to trim the roots back and shorten the leaves before planting.  Put a string line down the middle of the bed and poke holes through the mulch every 15cm with a good dibber. Drop a leek in each hole making sure that the roots have hit the bottom. Reset the string 20cm from the first row and continue making rows of leeks until you get to the edge. Then go round the other side, and do the same.

To maintain a bit of diversity in the bed, I throw in fennel and lettuce plants about once every 10 leeks. That means growing or buying 50 leeks per m2 of bed, and 5 each of fennel and lettuce.

Water everything heavily and in case of exceptionally hot and dry weather, water daily or every other day for a week, until established.

The leeks will need regular hair cuts. Once the leaves get so long as to drop back toward the ground, chop off with scissors. These cutings, if well shredded across the fibres, can go into soups with pumpkin or squash. The repeated pruning makes the shanks grow thick and juicy. Deep planting assures nice white flesh. As frost becomes a risk, pull out and eat the fennel and salad crops, and stop trimming the leeks.

 

What you have also gained from growing leeks is a natural tilling action. The roots of leeks are like a high pressure spaghetti machine that pushes into the soil around the plant. When we planted, it was into a soil that has been opened with a fork only twice. All the rest of the work has been done by soil life organisms and the combined effort of potatoes and leeks. You will see as you pull them out (they should pull out whole without breaking leaving a fine tilled soil behind them and a few small clods) that your soil is in great shape. And will now stay like that forever if you follow the rules.

Now it gets tricky. Do you remember singing in rounds at school. One group would start a song, then another would take up the same song but be one line behind? Here we go in the round on the ground. During the winter where bed 1 is full of leeks, you need to go back to the start and lay out another potato bed just like the last one. This means a bit more work, but we are going to take each bed to a high level of maturity within its first 3 years. The work will always be dropping in relation to the volume produced.  By the time you get to 5 beds, you will have the choice: remain a small scale partial self supporter who does it as a productive hobby, or start a breakaway strategy, taking a part time job, or setting up a small business to work from home. Then things really do start to get better. You enter into the new paradigme economy, where what you do and who you are have a definite and deliberate positive impact on your community.

This little strip garden has just 4 beds. The rotation and companion cropping allows 16 different crops per year. The beans, peas and beets were sown into mole hill soil laid into rows made in the mulch which was laid on the grass. Everything grew on top of the mulch while the "work" was going on below

Depending on your local climat (winter minimum temperatures above or below -5C.) You can grow peas and broad beans in your bed to overwinter. If you are in these mild winter conditions, you can sow them in November. First you need space.  Eat, freeze or make into soup two whole rows of leeks. Pick off the mulch to expose a row of bare soil and crumble the soil in the row down to 5cm of fine tilth with your fingers. Sow beans and overwintering peas in these rows. (If they die off in January give this practice up as a no go.

 

I insisted in 2014 and 2015 on a piece of land 30km from where i practiced the same thing in 2008 - 11. At the new house i lost them systematically where as at the old house, i had bumper crops year in year out. All because of a defavourable micro climat.

 

Legumes (peas, beans, etc) do not like onion family crops and vice versa. This winter co habitation is just about tolerable for them. However, keep this in mind as winter fades into spring. Get those leeks out early to let the peas and broad beans fourish.

 

If you are in a hard winter area, you will have to sow peas and broad beans in february or march. If you have a greenhouse, you will be able to sow rows of peas in plastic guttering and transplant whole rows already well established to catch up the delay. You need to preload the guttering with  length of rafia string under the potting compost to help slide the row into place. The roots of the peas and beans hold it all together.

 

Peas and beans do better in a cool climate. The idea is to get them eaten, bottled or frozen by April or early May. In March or April its time to plant out the next crop, in amongst the peas and beans, but before that, its time to get into setting the bed up for the longterm futur.

We're going to occupy some of the bed (at least two spots, I choose the ends personally) with perenial plants. The choice is enormous. In addition to feeding myself i also like to heal myself from my garden so you'll find a growing collection of culinary and medicinal herbs overflowing at the ends of my beds. But you'll  also find some perenial flowers, (I salvage chrysanthemums and any other flowers and their pots from cemetery bins every halloween, it is a french custom that even the dead are into mindless consumerism),easy to reproduce perenial fruit bushes and lots plants that host and attract auxiliary species.

 

Some say i'm mad planting say, a budleia in the northern end of a veg bed. Budleia are invasive. Invasive also means abundant. Especially with something as attractive as a budleia, Any invasion is just production, i can pull out rogue plants and set them into other patterns such as an orchard project or a hedge system. I can also just give them away as presents in the pots i get the chrysanthemums in. I could even sell them along with other produce once i get to that stage. If my woody plants get out of hand, i have just to chop and drop to add yet more mulch to the soil.

 

It is very very important to choose woody perenials as well as herbacious. There are beneficial mushroom networks that will install themselves in  your bed if there are woody plants or trees present. The mushroom networks will ferry minerals and water around in exchange for starches from plant roots. (Don't let the government hear about this undrground economy or they'll tax it) These perenial islands will also provide shelter for diverse species of animals and insects. Annual pruning and shredding will add light woody mulch, as well as maturity to the bed.

 

Nearly all our vegetable crops are annual and biannual herbacious plants. They aren't as evolved as trees and bushes are. Having more evolved species present is like having a mixed range group of children. The big ones look after the small ones to some extent.

On with the veg cultures. Once you have dedicated space for perenials, it is time to drop in some brussels sprouts plants. (Need to be started in february in modules) If you don't like them its probably because you've never grown them and eaten them fresh. Part boiled or steamed and tossed around in a pan with cubed potatoes, chestnuts, leeks  and ham they make a perfect seasonal meal from november to february. Plant the brussels out as soon as they are big enough, between the peas and beans and a good meter between plants.

 

The brussels arent the only crop though, once the peas and beans are out of the way fill the space with lettuce, radishes and some late sown red cabbages. It is a great idea at this stage to plant self seeding annual flowers too. Cosmos, calendula, nastrucians etc.

 

Let three of the best lettuces in the bed go to seed this year too, your soil will then become well stocked with annual flowers and good lettuce seeds, they will replace the weeds the following year.  In June fill all the gaps with long black radish too.

 

It is now very easy to plant and sow. You just have to open the mulch, crumble the soil with your fingers and sow or plant by station or in rows. Once plants are developed, close the mulch again.

Any weeding is just mulch harvest. Rip it out and dump it on top. Any inedible parts of plants must also return into the mulch of the bed and not the worm bin. Keep a wormbin near the house for peelings and the kitchen scraps, but do a quick and rough selection as you harvest to leave a maximum of biomass in the bed. In winter and springtime, some grasses can get out of hand and never die as their roots hold enough soil to allow them to survive on the moon unassisted. Make a pile near the perenials, lay them roots up and layer them with dead leaves or wood chippings. in high summer you can spread this composted mulch on the bed and finish off any really resistant weeds by letting them burn in the sun.

 

Don't forget to start yet another potato bed during the winter, and to continue to shuffle the cultures down a bed each year...

 

From now on, maintain a 4 cm mulch on the bed at all times. In the first years keep it down to hay, straw, grass clippings and dead leaves. By the third year we can start adding woodchip. Woodchippings are fantastic but the soil life must be ready for it and you must have enough green material to supplement it the first year of use. In spring time when you want the soil to heat up for sowing you can remove the mulch and pile it up with any weeds at one end or in several piles. Once all the brussels are eaten. Chop up the stems and the weeds and pile it all up with the rest. Leave the soil to warm up during the month of march and sow carrots in early april.

 

Carrotts are difficult to get raised. They need watering every day if it doesn't rain and never seem to grow much, then one day, all of a sudden you have a forest of them and they need thinning. I grow my leek seedlings in rows between my carrot rows. They mutually protect each other.

 

Lettuces and flowers should pop up here and there too. You can move them or work round them as you like. As the planting arrangement starts to show through, mulch the gaps before the weather gets too hot.

 

While waiting for the soil to warm up, you can finish the bed structure.  Peg wooden planks down the sides of the bed. On the outisde you can plant daffodils, tulips, iris, chives and especially comfrey B14. This will make a nice organic barrier and lots of green mulch to add in summer from the comfrey.

 

When you mow the paths,  the comfrey lets the mower under the leaves and makes a neat tidy effect with no need for the strimmer. Now the buttercups and kooch grass can't get into the bed because it is surrounded by an underground wall of roots.

 

By this stage you should have three beds, one with potatoes, one with peas, beans and young brussels, and one finished bed, with great soil, a perennial organic exterior border, and the inside filled with carrots, leek seedlings, and spontaneously sprouted annual flowers and salad crops.

 

From here on in, i'll let you work it out for yourselves. There is a list at the bottom of the page that works for me and my soil and climat. You can get the idea from there. Keep the beds full, change families as often as possible, with added preference for nitrogen fixers. Plant complimentry cultures and try to group them so that they finish together. If they don't finish together, make clear rows nice and wide so that as one comes to an end you can work the space and fill it with something else.

 

That's my kickstart technique, its easy, fun, thorough, and as you learn more about permaculture you should find that this beginning fits in harmoniously with your expanding design and knowledge.  You can set up a greywater system and send clean water downhill to your garden. You can plant a chicken orchard where its a bit less sunny, setup a greenhouse, a pergola with a grape vine or a kiwi, grow craft crops and take up the craft, the possibilities are endless once you're in the game. I hope i've given you the keys to get started.

 

PS; You can also be a complete nutter and use the sheet mulch technique but adapt it for each culture THE FIRST YEAR.  When we started our garden I laid down 15 beds each covering 16m2. We grew 33 different products the first year. I have a fifteen bed system that shuffles the cultures on every year to the next bed. Once it was all established and growing, we literally abandoned it to reroof our house and THEN I went off for two weeks teaching work. When I got back, Flo had gently weeded everything and we were into bottling and harvesting for winter storeage.

 

If you are an experienced or very brave nutter and want more info, don't hesitate to get in touch.

 

 

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