High yielding, low maintenance vegetable gardening that’s perfect for our modern-day lifestyle
When we think of organic gardening and permaculture we tend to
conjure up images of bearded warriors dressed in overalls who dedicate
their lives to working long days in their vegetable plots. Whilst this
may be a wonderful way to live your life, it doesn’t suit the average
suburbanite with a full-time job and a hefty mortgage.
Growing food is typically seen as either an art form or damned
hard work. It’s no wonder that very few people produce enough food to
feed their family. But what if a technique came along that was so easy
and so prolific that even the busiest corporate executive could grow a
significant portion of their family’s food in less time than it takes
to drive to the shops. Ecological gardening just might be the answer.
In my experience, it’s the ultimate modern-day convenience vegetable
plot.
An ecological garden is an ecosystem made up of edible plants,
and it behaves in exactly the same way as a natural habitat. Over
time, you become more of an observer than a gardener as you watch
Mother Nature do most of the work.
The wonderful thing about nature is that she works tirelessly,
24 hours a day, seven days a week. Nature follows very simple laws and
works in the same way, on any system, anywhere in the world. To
understand ecological gardening, observing natural ecosystems can
provide us with the answers we need. A natural ecosystem is made up of
thousands of living and non-living components all coexisting in a given
area. Each living component occupies its own niche space and the role
of the niche space is very important to understand when creating an
ecological garden.
Let’s look at an example. Imagine a giant rainforest tree
crashing to the ground after standing tall for hundreds of years. Such
a large tree would have filled an enormous niche space. Lying in the
soil, hundreds of dormant seeds spring to life, desperately fighting
for their opportunity to occupy the best real estate in the forest -
the empty niche space. The niche space is quickly filled and harmony
is restored.
When we look at a traditional vegetable garden with this type
of insight, what we see is a very unnatural system. There is very
little diversity and a lot of empty niche spaces. Nature enforces her
will on vegetable gardens in exactly the same way she does a
rainforest, and this means that empty niches spaces will be filled as
quickly as possible. However, in a traditional vegetable garden there
are no desirable seeds waiting to fill the niches spaces, so weeds fill
them instead.
The solution to this problem is to create a garden that has
tightly filled niche spaces so that weeds don’t have any
opportunities. We can achieve this by using a planting arrangement
that mimics a natural ecosystem. This type of planting arrangement also
creates a range of highly protected micro-climates. This ideal
growing environment causes your plants to last much longer. Greens
don’t bolt to seed as soon as a hot spell hits and cold sensitive
plants are more protected as well. The planting arrangement also
creates a natural form of pest management.
Managing an ecological garden is different to managing a
traditional vegetable garden. With an ecological garden, there is far
less to do. As you become the observer and allow nature to take over
as head gardener, you will notice that the garden is in a continual
state of gentle change, just like a natural ecosystem. It can be
difficult for the traditional gardener to stand back and observe, as
many of us instinctively like to control things. This style of
gardening calls for a great deal of faith in natural laws.
Absolutely everyone from farmers to inner-city townhouse
dwellers can create an ecological garden. It may seem strange, but if
you have never grown food before then you are, in some ways, at an
advantage. Like all industries, the gardening industry can get stuck
in doing things a certain way and most seasoned gardeners will
inevitably over-work the garden. As a species, human beings prospered
when we learnt to cultivate food using tilling and other traditional
agricultural methods, so it’s difficult to turn back to where we came
from - nature. It might even feel like a step in the wrong direction.
But if we can let go of our need to control every living thing on the
planet, and start to work with nature, we actually gain more control by
being able to grow food more efficiently than ever before. It’s a
paradox - but it works!
Growing food is not hard work, especially when you have nature
helping you 24/7. A small area can provide you with a bounty of food,
saving your family thousands of dollars per year. Most of us don’t
have much time to spend in the garden, including me. I only invest
around eight hours per year to growing my food, and although I live on a
small farm, I only use a space of around 6m x 6m. That’s an area that
could fit into many suburban backyards several times over. The most
wonderful thing about this method is that I know I can ignore my
vegetable garden for months and it won’t miss a beat. So, if you
believe growing food is only for tough, bearded warriors with a lot of
time - think again. Ecological gardening could be just the thing for
you.