COVID-19 Community Resilience & Permaculture Course

Session 13:  

Permaculture for vegetable gardening (Part 2)
What is the optimal garden bed to grow vegetables?  

Vegetable gardening is one part of the entire permaculture cosmos. For the people coming from gardening and looking for new techniques to increase their yield, it is the bounding link and their access door. Once they entered they will see that permaculture has way more to offer than just boosting vegetable production. Permaculture is actually offering a holistic system design system that works with interlinkages between elements. 

Today's session is about showcasing different permaculture garden bed techniques to grow your own vegetables. After finishing part 2 of this session you will be introduced to:

• Straw bell garden beds,

• Spot planting,

• Keyhole garden beds, and

• Banana circle  

To get the full experience about garden beds let’s jump back to Session 12 and Part 1 of permaculture and vegetable gardening in order to learn about:

• No-till garden beds,

• Double Dig garden beds,

• Raised garden beds,

• Hugelkultur,

Video for Session 13 Permaculture and Vegetable Gardening Part 2:

Different garden beds for vegetable growing in Permaculture

Let’s dive into the different forms of vegetable gardening:

Strawbale garden beds

Plant right into the straw or hay bales. The bale becomes the garden bed and growing medium. The result is an easy to set up spot for growing vegetables.

When to use?

It is very fast to set up and you can set it up everywhere. It has a high success rate due to a higher germination rate. No overwatering or crop rotation needed.

How to build a straw bale garden?

Define your bed structure, put the straw bales in place, and plant right into it. If you like, you can sprinkle some harvested compost, compost tea, or other organic fertilizer on top. As straw needs a lot of nitrogen to decompose, you want to plant some nitrogen-fixing plants around the bales or ensure that you have soaked them in nitrogen-rich liquid (such as urine). 

Spot planting

Spot planting is a natural farming and permaculture technics.  Around the plant, you are adding fertility by mixing compost and topsoil to create a small spot high in fertility. By creating fertile pockets in garden beds or on your entire land, you are increasing soil fertility exactly where needed.

When to use?

Spot planting is a great start to transition a big plot of land into a fertile garden. It mostly starts with creating ‘islands’: fertile soil pockets for trees surrounded by plants that are benefiting the development of the tree while giving a yield. From there, you can start linking the different ‘islands’ to create a growing oasis. Spot planting is also helpful if you establish some of the garden beds mentioned above but lack access to the fertile soil. By piling your limited resources where actually needed, you make the most of your resources.  

Advantage: Small areas of the land are transformed into fertile and usable garden beds in a gentle way, meaning less energy input and material. Human interaction with nature is focused and minimized.   

Disadvantage: Not ideal for creating an intensive-use kitchen garden. Weed control is complicated as the garden bed is surrounded by wilder areas.  

How to use spot planting? 

There are two ways of using spot planting: The first one uses the same layering method than the no-dig bed.  You are focusing only on that part where you will plant a tree or create a small fertile pocket for vegetable growth. The second one gives rich and healthy soil around your plant roots.Both ways create fertile pockets within your plot of land or garden bed. 

Banana circle

A banana circle is a classic permaculture technique. That’s because it’s a perfect partnership between edible plants and waste. When to use?It’s a way for you to compost food scraps and wastewater like you would in a regular compost pile while simultaneously creating an ideal growing environment for bananas and other plants.

How to create a banana circle?

To plant a banana circle in your garden, simply dig a circular pit, about two meters wide and one meter deep. Take the soil you’ve removed and mound it around the pit. This is where you will plant your bananas, and the pit is where you’ll create a new compost pile. 

Keyhole Garden I

It is a two-meter-wide circular raised garden with a keyhole-shaped indentation on one side. The indentation allows gardeners to add uncooked vegetable scraps, greywater, and manure into a composting basket that sits in the center of the bed (similar to a banana circle). In this way, composting materials can be added to the basket throughout the growing season to provide nutrients for the plants. 

Key Hole Garden II

In permaculture describes a garden bed that has been laid out with one or more paths that dead-end rather than continuing through, in order to reduce the area of paths. Permaculture keyhole gardens tend to be wider and flatter than the version we just explained in keyhole garden 1 and do not generally incorporate a compost basket or compost pile built into the bed.

Learning exercise

Go out in your neighborhood and look into the gardens and talk with your neighbors and see what variety of different garden beds are implemented in your community. It is also. very interesting to figure out why people went for one or the other technics, so just ask.