MAPS HELP YOU KNOW where you are going and a map of your garden is no exception. As you are designing your map, use all space wisely. Sustainable diets strive to leave a small footprint. To assess what you have, measure the space you have to work with, draw it out on paper, and divide the garden area into beds. I like 4′ wide garden beds, but some people with a shorter reach prefer 3′ wide beds. The wider the bed, the more efficiently the space is used, up to a point. You will not be efficient if you are not comfortable working in a bed that is too wide.
Having wider beds gives you more growing area in proportion to your space. As you can see in Figure 2.1, in the same footprint of 700 ft2, you would have 7 percent more growing space with 4′ wide beds, rather than 3′ wide beds. Within that same footprint, you could gain another 25 ft2 by making the paths 1½′ wide, rather than 2′ wide.
Plan your paths. Wide paths are only needed if you are bringing in equipment or lots of people. The narrower your paths, the less you have to manage. I’ve found a good workable width is 18″, which allows room for a rolling stool. I have trouble moving around in anything less than that. Some paths can be wider, such as when dividing sections of the garden, but not all the paths need to be wide.
Figure 2.1. Bed Width Comparison
Have a plan for maintaining the paths from the beginning. In the narrow paths between my beds I plant Dutch white clover, or I mulch with leaves from the trees in our yard. The clover is a short-lived perennial. Occasionally it dies out and needs to be replanted. When it is growing vigorously it tends to creep into the sides of the beds. That’s when it is time to harvest it for mulch or for the compost pile. I cut it with a sickle to harvest, but only have to do that a couple times over the summer. The clover keeps the weeds out, gives me a nice green carpet to be working on, and provides plenty of habitat for beneficial insects. If, instead, I put down leaves in the fall to mulch the paths, they will gradually decompose and by the next year will have become compost to toss onto the beds.
Other alternatives for mulching paths are newspaper and cardboard, but that is material you have to bring in from elsewhere. You might already have a supply as part of your circle of living. As long as they don’t contain harmful chemicals to leach into your garden, these materials do a good job of keeping the weeds out of your paths. Pizza boxes are a good size to lay down in the path. Grass clippings thrown over cardboard or paper mulch make them look better, keep them from blowing away, and help them compost in place. Cardboard and newspaper are what I used before I decided to eliminate outside inputs in my paths. Recently I had an old cotton bedspread that, after forty years, had reached the end of its useful life in the house. I put that down in a path that I wouldn’t be digging up anytime soon and threw some leaves on top.
Figure 2.2. Connecting 4 × 4 Beds
If you happen to have a garden full of 4′ × 4′ beds, linking them together into longer beds could increase your production area by 20 percent, as shown in Figure 2.2. Besides increasing the production area, having fewer paths results in less path maintenance. Grass paths are a possibility for the wider paths, but not the narrow ones. Maneuvering a mower in tight spaces might result in damage to your plants. Grass paths require mowing and you need to be careful not to blow grass onto your beds. You don’t want to be washing grass off your harvested vegetables. Bagging the grass when you mow these paths gives you mulch or compost material.
My large garden is divided into four sections of nine beds each, with 18″ paths between the beds. This is the garden you see in my DVD Cover Crops and Compost Crops IN Your Garden. There is nothing magical about having nine beds in a row that I know of. That’s just what fits into my available space and it works well for me. The sections are divided by 4′ wide grass paths that I mow with a push mower, bagging the grass. When I originally planned out that garden, I imagined I would just zip through there on the riding mower, which I did in the early years. That was before the garden fence went up. As the plantings got more intense there was no room for the riding mower, which was okay because I couldn’t bag the grass with that mower anyway. The wide paths, in addition to providing more work space and easy access between sections, are now part of my plan to supply mulch in the form of grass clippings to some of my beds.
Figure 2.3. Large Garden
Fall is the time at my place to redefine the bed edges, if necessary. As I harvest the last of the summer crops and plant the cover crops, I dig out the narrow paths if they’ve been mulched or if the white clover has died back, and toss that rich soil onto the beds. Doing this defines the path and enriches the bed. I either broadcast white clover again in the path or mulch with leaves. If you are starting a new garden, dig out the paths. That sod you remove will go to your new compost pile. Any extra soil you dig from the paths can go to build up your new beds. If it is clay that you are digging up, add it to the compost, rather than to your bed. Clay holds a lot of nutrients that can become available in the composting process.
On your garden map identify each bed with a number or letter, or both. In my garden the four main sections are designated as A, B, C, and D, plus an additional section (E) of smaller beds for perennials. The nine beds in each section are identified as A1, A2, A3, etc. Farmers make similar maps, but instead of beds they have fields, with names to identify them.
If you anticipate predators you may want to plan for a fence. I’ll address fences in Chapter 12. My large garden has a good fence now, but it had none when I started out. Even without a fence, you can establish a border. A border defines your space and could be an area surrounding your garden, planted to annual or perennial plants that will enhance your ecosystem, attracting beneficial insects that keep the harmful ones in balance. More about that in Chapter 6. A border could be allowed to develop into more of a hedge, planted to one or more types of bushes or small trees. A hedge is something to keep in mind for the future as you plan your space. The height of a hedge needs to be considered so it doesn’t shade your vegetable beds. As you can see on the map (Figure 2.3), I have a hazelnut hedge planted on the north side of my garden.
I run my garden beds east to west. In my large garden, each bed is 4′ × 20′. In 1985 I began with 12 beds, each 5′ × 20′ and planted in pairs. Each pair of beds had a 2′ mulched path between the beds and was surrounded by a 4′ grass path. The idea, which I had read about in a magazine article, was to allow space for a garden cart along each bed for bringing in mulch. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I only needed 18″ between the beds and that if I wanted to bring leaves in for mulch, it could be easily managed from the short sides. I also discovered I’m more comfortable working in a 4′ wide bed than a 5′ one. I took out those wide grass paths, making room for more beds, and made the paths between the beds 18″. The new plan increased my growing area within the same space and decreased the area needed to be maintained as paths.
Wire grass, a type of Bermuda grass, is a problem in my area anywhere there is grass, and my garden is no exception. It shows up whether we want it to or not, spreading by both rhizomes and stolons. Limiting the grass along the bed edges limits the threat of wire grass creeping in. Often, people want to surround their beds with wood boxes. That’s not something I recommend, unless you have a really good reason. Doing it because that’s how you think you start a garden is not a good reason. Doing it to exclude wire grass is an even worse reason. If you have wire grass, a box around your beds is not going to keep it out. In fact, it prolongs the problem because parts of the plant will sit right under the edge of the box to keep coming back. The same goes for other barriers you might spend time and money on. Having narrow, well maintained paths leaves no place for the wire grass to grow.
Don’t hesitate to make changes if you find things don’t work as well as you originally planned. A bed length of 20′ works well for me and fits my space nicely. When I was selling vegetables, I had an additional garden with beds 4′ × 75′. A market grower friend of mine had beds 4′ × 200′.
You don’t have to stick with rectangles for your garden beds. My smaller garden began with rows of 4′ wide beds in 1984. The next year I redesigned it, imagining it would be filled with flowers and herbs and look nice when we pulled in the driveway. I had started the larger garden for my main vegetable production. The new design for the small garden, which I found in a book, was not practical for me. That redesign might have been nice if I had more time to work with it, but our fourth child was born the following year. With a busy family life, I was doing well just to keep up with vegetable production in the larger garden. Just because it is in a book, doesn’t mean it will work for you. That goes for this book also. What I want to do here is to teach you to think. Yes, by all means, try my ideas and see if they work for you. If not, maybe just a little tweaking is all you need, but you need a starting point: a frame of reference.
A few more years went by and eventually we needed to have more driveway space to allow for parking and turning around. The road we live on had become too busy to back out into safely. I enrolled in a landscape design class being taught at the local high school to help with this planning. Mapping out the area on graph paper helped me decide that the place to add the new parking area was beside the small garden and would interfere with the garden path that went through the middle. When I moved the path over a few feet, everything changed. I put in a curved path that took me from the backyard to the barnyard. From there, other paths fell into place, for a time (see Figure 2.4). Every few years I find some reason or other to make changes in that garden, but that backyard-to-barnyard path stays put. If you have a path in your yard, put a garden around it. Decide where you would naturally be walking with a purpose and plan your beds around that.
Figure 2.4. Garden Map 1992
Figure 2.5. Garden Map 2009
That garden has always had some areas for flowers and herbs, in addition to the vegetable beds. The redesign had three 100 ft2 beds for vegetables that rotated together and three 50 ft2 vegetable beds that rotated, along with a couple of smaller spots for vegetables and a coldframe. Along the north side is the chicken pen fence. When I divided the chicken pen into different areas, one for composting, I decided to make a gate from the garden into the compost area of the pen. For easier access, I needed a new path. This new design gave me an opportunity to put in some keyhole beds (Figure 2.5). It had seven 50 ft2 beds in rotation, including one for compost. I added apples to cordon in the southeast corner. As they grew they were trained along horizontal supports to form a fence.
Figure 2.6. Garden Map 2013
A few years later I needed space for the solar dryers I’d built so we wouldn’t have to move them to mow. In addition, although the keyhole beds were okay, the 4′ wide beds were easier for me to manage. This called for another redesign. I’ve now made a space for the solar dryers in this garden and converted the two keyholes beside the path to the chicken composting area to 4′ wide beds. The keyhole bed on the other side of the garden is also gone. I no longer devote a bed for compost in this garden. With access to the chicken composting area right at hand, that’s where the compost materials go. The 3′ × 6′ coldframe needed to be rebuilt. The new one is 4′ × 8′. Bed #1 is smaller now and out of the rotation. Strawberries are planned for that spot. That upper right corner is still evolving — food forest style. A grape vine is going in, for sure, and some other perennials.
Only you can decide what size to make your garden beds. A uniform area in each bed, no matter what shape, makes it easier to plan rotations and to anticipate seed needs and yields, which I’ll talk about in coming chapters.
Now, I want you to draw another map. This time make it a map of your whole property. Your house, driveway, and outbuildings will be in it. You will be in it. You will be considering all of it when you grow your sustainable diet. I call this map your permaculture plan. You will remember that in Chapter 1 I defined permaculture as a design system whereby all the energies within a system are used to maximum efficiency. On this map you can identify niches for certain things that are just the right size and microclimate, even if they aren’t in your main garden area. A protected area for a fig tree or a spot for herbs by the back door are examples of this. You can also use this map to help identify places to store equipment and crops. The Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture is a good resource to consult when making a map such as this.
We usually look out at our property from our houses. In order to really look at your property with new eyes, go to different corners of the property and look from there. Take plenty of pictures. Go over to your neighbor’s house and look from there. Your home and gardens will definitely look different from their yard. You might also discover that the junk you put behind your shed so you wouldn’t see it is in full view of the neighbors when they sit on their deck. When you are cleaning out your gutters, take a camera up that ladder with you and take pictures of your property from above. We have a sandbox that we maintain for young visitors and it has a roof over top for children to climb up to. Atop that sandbox is my favorite place to photograph my garden at various times of the growing season.
Observe your property at different times of the year. If you live in an area that gets snow, take pictures as the snow melts. Where does it melt first? That’s your warm spot. Where does it linger after everywhere else looks like spring is coming? That is not the place to plant your early spring crops. As the sun gets higher in the sky, trees and buildings will cast shorter shadows. I have my solar dryers in a great place in the garden, but by September the big maple tree in the backyard begins to cast a longer shadow and I have to move the dryers to catch a full day of sun. On the other hand, if you thought all you had was shade in your yard because of the trees, look again once the leaves have dropped. You might be able to plant a winter garden in the sun, having greens for your table during the cold months. By the way, make sure the trees are on your permaculture plan.
When I first planned my large garden, compost bins made of pallets lined the north side. It made sense because it was easy access when I brought in compost materials from elsewhere, primarily leaves and animal bedding. Once I got serious about sustainability, I realized I wanted to limit outside inputs and began growing my own compost materials, which meant adding grains to my garden. Everything was now being moved around within the garden, rather than being hauled in. Before I knew it, I didn’t have to bring the garden cart in anymore. As the biomass from the beds was harvested, it was carried to the compost piles and finished compost was delivered to the beds in buckets.
After seeing how well my butternut squash grew over my compost pile, I began to rethink how I managed compost. There was obviously fertility leaching away under those compost piles on the north side of the garden and I wanted to harvest it to feed my crops. I got rid of the bins and planned my compost to become part of the garden rotations. The compost piles are now on garden beds, with butternut squash growing over the pile that was built the previous fall. That pile matures over the summer, underneath the squash plants, and is ready to spread in September and October. Any compost that needs to be held longer is turned to the next bed in the fall and the new piles are built on that new compost bed. With the compost bins gone, I bumped out the fence on the north side and have a hazelnut (filbert) hedge there. I also found room on that north side for a garden washing station, two more garden beds, an apple tree, basket willow, and a spot I’ve reserved to dig a small pond when I find the time (see Figure 2.3). With my compost, just as with the lunch at the Haiti gathering that I told you about in Chapter 1, it only took looking at the project in a new way. Stay open to the possibilities and new ones will present themselves, right before your eyes. All you have to do is recognize them as such. The more you make yourself part of the plan, the easier it will be to identify these things.
You can start with graph paper, a ruler, pencils, and an eraser. You’re going to need that eraser. Your maps will reflect what you put into them. If you are mapping out your beds, you will definitely need to measure carefully and be accurate. If you are making a map of your property, you decide how exact you need to be. If you know the length of your stride, pacing off your boundaries might be enough. I remember in my high school marching band we had to all take the same size step. Whatever yours is will be your measure. If you do a really good job on this map, it will be more help to you later.
I’ve found a 100′ tape measure to be a wonderful tool to have. It has a fiberglass tape with inches on one side and decimal designations on the other. The end has a hole that I put a screwdriver through to anchor it in the ground when I don’t have anyone on the other end to hold it. Although in a perfect world it would be clean and dry always, it survives nicely if it is occasionally wound up wet or dirty, since the tape is not enclosed. You can find one at building supply stores. A ruler is good, but an engineer’s scale is even better, particularly if you are drawing on plain paper, rather than graph paper. If you really like this sort of thing you could sign up for a landscape drawing class somewhere, but graph paper, pencil, eraser, and a ruler will get you started.
It is helpful to choose a reference spot when making your maps. It might be your house or a fence that’s already there. It may even be just a post. I’ve found it extremely helpful to have a metal fencepost at the corners of each section in my large garden. If I need to realign the beds I can quickly run a string and know where the corners are. If you don’t already have a fence or post in your garden, now is the time to plan it in. Besides being a point to measure from, posts and fences give birds landing spots to check out the area for insects to eat.
Make sure to show the scale — how many feet in one inch — on the map. To get the detail you want for your permaculture plan, you may have to tape pieces of graph paper together. If your map is bigger than what you can copy on a copy machine, fold it and copy the pieces. You can tape those pieces together later, maybe on a backing of poster board. If you are copying your map in pieces, while you are making copies of the original plan at 100 percent to have an exact copy, make some smaller ones. Figure out what size you need so the resulting pieces will all fit on a standard size sheet of paper. Cut out what you need from the smaller copies, tape them on their new size paper, and make copies of that. You can make many sizes to play with. The more familiar you are with the copy machines at your office supply store, the better. You can always ask the employees to make the different size copies for you, but it is good to learn to do it yourself.
An 8½ × 11 size is nice to put in your notebook. You might want a larger size with color added (I use colored pencils) to put in a poster sized frame to hang on the wall. If you don’t have a map that shows the whole of your property, you will always be leaving something out in your mind. It also helps to see things in proper proportion to everything else on your property. You could cover copies of your garden map and permaculture plan with clear contact paper. Using wipe-off markers, you can have fun thinking up new plans. When you come up with something you like, draw it on one of those extra copies you made. Your family members might even want to get involved with that.
Figure 2.7. Base Permaculture Map for Sunfield Farm
Leave a wild spot on your property when you are planning. That would be an area that is left alone and not cultivated. If you are living where “wild” might be frowned upon, some bushes or a tree with bushes will do. Anywhere that is not messed with too often will provide habitat for beneficial insects. Those bushes could be something that flower early, providing nectar for the bees. (Having a perennial flower bed could also fill this niche.) If your neighbors live close and have phobias about insects, maybe it might be best not to mention attracting bees and bugs. Wild areas help to maintain diversity. If they connect from one property to another they become wildlife corridors — highways for the wildlife. Not cultivating from property line to property line is a start. Some communities plan for undeveloped space. Unfortunately, sometimes residents do not recognize the value of those areas.
The base permaculture map of our place, Sunfield Farm, is shown above (Figure 2.7). This is the starting point of all the plans and only shows the property lines, fences, and buildings. At times I’ve made larger maps of portions of this map to show more detail when planning projects. I’ve done that for each of the gardens, the backyard, the back pasture area, and the barnyard. If you own your house you may have a copy of the plot plan that resulted from the survey that was done when you moved in. If you are not skilled at map making you could just use that as your base map.
