Intensive Organic Gardening - How to Grow More Food in Your Garden

Here's an easy tip to increase greatly the planting area of the organic garden. It helps you grow more vegetables the natural gardening way, plus little fruits and salad plants for less work: Here's an organic Lazy Barrow - with handles!

Make a pile some four foot broad by five foot in length as well as four foot deep of any woody, degradable material. Twigs, small branches, old logs, bushy stems, raspberry canes, wood chips, the roots of shrubs... whatever comes easily to hand.

The basic dimensions are not important, provided we build the tumulus as high as possible. Interlay the woody stuff each and every two or three inches with rough soil, plus plenty of fresh manure if available. Shape the surface of the mound using the best soil into a fat wall with sloping flanks and a flat top.

If you measure the flanks as well as top area of the barrow you'll see that they come to nearly twice the planting area of the bottom.

It's an effective idea to keep the soil in order utilizing slabs sliced from a lawn (turves) and turned over. You can slice these turves from a field. They'll maintain the tumlus in good form plus quickly degrade into fine compost. Alternatively, hessian sacks, burlap, woollen carpets, old clothes, fishing mesh or thick fabrics might be staked about the flanks to impede soil erosion. You could still push plants into holes sliced within this shroud.

You have your own 'Wayland's Smithy'

You now have a model of the well known Wayland's Smithy, that extended hill on England's historic Ridgeway that was the burial crypt of tribal kings. We might raise virtually anything within the flanks of this barrow. Large plants which grow deep roots can be set at the apex. Their roots will come across all the depth they need without fear of being blocked by impacted soil or stones below.

A lazy idea for organic vegetable growing

As you build the barrow, push into it many strong upright staves so they stick out a foot over the surface. The gardener will find these helpful later for support as they reach across to pick edible plants from the tops of the tumulus without treading on as well as compressing the soil. Gardeners in the 19th century erected upright hills for strawberries as much as six foot high using this idea. However, they raised ziggurats: a complex system of tiers of decreasing area, on top of each other with each one making its own bed.

We now have a Very Lazy Pyramid

You could easily develop the Lazy Barrow into a Lazy Pyramid on the Aztec model. You just build the barrow into a pyramid. At the bottom go the toughest waste things, followed by further levels of more decayable stems. Overlay the slanted sides with turves to stop rain washing away the soil.

A Lazy Pyramid has no advantage over Lazy Barrows, however they will provoke speculative writers in time to come with proof that a land bridge was once in place between your own garden and South America.

A Lazy Barrow is actually the ultimate raised bed for intensive organic gardening. It will give us up to twice the planting surface of its ground dimensions. You can grow plants that need bright sun or depth for long roots near the apex or upon the southern as well as western slopes, like a herb spiral. Plants that like shade like brassica might be sown about the northern and eastern sides and bog-loving vegetables like celery and cress could be set around the outskirts where they can benefit from the downflow of rain.

How to turn wood waste into nutritious compost

Another value of the Lazy Barrow is that it gets rid of otherwise long-persistent woody materials. After a few years, we can level the tumulus and at its base should be well-rotted compost, ready to grow potatoes or other sturdy vegetables. So if you must get rid of large quantities of clippings and dead wood, and you can't shred them, create Lazy Barrows - and harvest food from them!

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