Whatever you decide to plant, don’t make it all one thing. Do your garden and the environment a favor. Embrace biodiversity now.
A monoculture may have certain advantages. If you’re growing a single type of plant for money, and you can get the crop to ripen at the same size at the same time, you can maximize your profit by harvesting faster and selling in bulk.
The world, like dreams, will never come true. Operate on intuition. — Jack Kerouac
Cover crops may be the easiest, least expensive and most effective way to fertilize. The disadvantage is you don't get to use the land to grow other things for a season, but many of these crops are attractive enough on their own that this at least won't be a loss on aesthetic terms. Here are some examples:
Alfalfa: Sow in late summer. It adds nutrients and the roots break up soil.
Buckwheat: Sow in late summer or early spring. It brings up phosphorus from the subsoil. Turn it under before it gets too big to turn easily.
Crimson clover: Sow in spring, summer or fall. It grows quickly, adds nitrogen to soil, looks great and is a favorite with bees. An excellent first choice.
Lupin: Sow in fall or early spring. It provides edible beans and makes phosphorus available to other plants.
Oats: Sow in late summer or early spring. It fixes nitrogen in the soil. It doesn't get as tall or as fibrous as buckwheat.
Rye: Sow in spring or fall. It grows quickly, is good for a shortseason area and is easy to till in.
Soybeans: Sow in spring or fall. The big beans are easy to broadcast. It helps condition the soil by secreting an organic acid that gets broken down by soil fungi.
Summer vetch: Sow in late summer. It's an effective nitrogen fixer and can withstand an early frost.
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DESIGN TIP
Formal or not? Nature does plenty of things symmetrically. In fact it's one of our measures of beauty (few celebrities have lopsided faces), but symmetry in a garden plan suggests an intentional order imposed on a site. This can be used to strong effect — the same type of tree or shrub on either side of a path can make walking along the route an immersive experience. But symmetry is a rather mannered look that needs a fairly heavy hand to pull off. If this is what you want, you should do it obviously so that the meaning is clear. An attempt at symmetry that fails will only be unsettling.
Or you can throw out symmetry altogether and go for a more natural look, using not sameness but balance as your guide. Either way, it's good to settle on a style first and know what you want before you begin planting.
And from a design point of view, a monoculture is not always a bad thing. Those waving fields of sunflowers don’t need any other colors mixed in to look impressive.
The design vs. function dilemma is played out in gardens everywhere, typified by the selection of street trees. Some designers prefer one type of tree to line an entire street. This makes a bold visual display. A row of flowering cherries in spring or scarletleaved maples in fall can be a soul-stirring thing.
But one problem with a monoculture is that it’s unnatural. Growing a single crop may require higher levels of maintenance as certain nutrients get used up all at once. It also means the site itself will be less healthy, if you judge health in terms of the ability to resist disease. The Irish potato famine that killed more than a million people in the 1840s was the result of a monocrop attacked by a single organism, the fungus Phytophthora infestans.
The solution is to mix things up. You can alternate cherries and maples and still get a great visual effect, but you’re less likely to suffer from a single unexpected disease or weather condition wiping out every tree on the block.
The no mono idea goes beyond street trees and big fields of crops. The more you can encourage biodiversity, the more attractive your space will be to more creatures. This brings you increasingly closer to the living, natural world. Bugs, bees, butterflies and others can make a place seem more alive for a good reason: it is more alive.
If there s a better goal to strive for in all our guerrilla gardening efforts, I don’t know what it is.