Garden Designs for Beauty and Function
Garden Designs for Beauty and Function
By Anneli Carter-Sundqvist
Our organic gardens are the hub of our homestead. They serve
many functions to us, like increasing our self-reliance and food security,
adding to the beauty of our farm, to our health, teaching opportunities, the
uniqueness of our lodging business and our very limited need of money.
When Dennis first came here 15 years ago, the driveway went
straight through what's now one of our gardens. Until a few years ago, the
other garden area still was a forest floor with standing trees. Today our two
gardens together measure about 8000 square feet and provide us with food year
round, as well as plenty for trading and giving away.
Use Natural Materials
The overarching philosophy for our gardens, as well as for
our homestead, is that maintenance and enhancement should be done as much as
possible by local, free and natural materials and that aesthetics and practical
functionality are inseparable. Everything around our farm should be pleasing to
the eye which usually for us means being made from wood, glass or stone, have a
designated location and a form and color that blends into a natural landscape.
But to be fully satisfactory, all that should also work well – add to the ease
with which we carry out our chores, be time saving, low maintenance, durable
and beneficial for the health of our land and ourselves. Our garden design is a
simple, straight-row lay out that we find both pleasing to the eye and efficient
to work with. We maximize the yield by building the soil with natural material,
incorporating succession planting and intensive space utilization and we
minimize the work by weed prevention, moisture management (to avoid watering)
and by timing our actions with the weather and seasons, to let sun, rain, heat
and cool work in our favor. We don't have a greenhouse or use row covers or
plastic mulches in our garden, since they don't meet our aesthetic ideals. The
function – a longer growing season – is met by using cold frames made from wood
and recycled glass that gives us overwintered greens and serves as a warm place
to start our brassica seedlings.
How to Build a Garden Fence
Our garden fence is one example where form and function
blends together. Deer are the greatest pest threat to our gardens and our 6
foot chicken wire fence is what it takes to keep them out. It's sturdy, yet the
wire is thin enough to make the fence basically transparent. The wooden posts
and railings blends in to the homestead picture and a couple of days each year
of replacing parts broken by wear or the weight of snow is all it takes for
maintenance.
We prefer to use locust wood as fence posts since it's
likely to last for decades without spoiling. It grows on the island and nearby
on the mainland and we're often contacted to salvage all or parts of trees that
people need to cut down. To use red oak is a compromise in quality but it grows
on our land, making it a sustainable option when we need it. If the part that
will be buried in the ground is thoroughly charred and it can last up to 10
years.
We dig the post holes 36 inches deep to get below the frost
line and prevent the posts from heaving in spring and we use rocks as a back
filler to secure the posts. Does it sound like a lot of work? Well, trust me,
it is. But a fence post of the right material that is properly put in the
ground will be there for decades and over the course of time it will still
amount to less work (and headache) than having to redo it in 5-6 years. We run
horizontal railings at 3 and 6 feet to attach the chicken wire to, they are
made from dense, slow growing red spruce that we harvest from our own land. The
best way to increase the longevity of the railings is to peel off about half of
the bark in strips so that the wood can dry slowly and the cracks be minimal,
preventing water from seeping in and rotting the wood. The gates are placed so
that the gardens are accessible from several directions, which makes it both
more inviting to enter and easier to work in.
The gardens are roughly divided in four different kind of
areas, all with their uses. We have raised beds, open areas, beds along the
fence and the paths.
Raised Beds
The raised beds are framed with logs, usually spruce or fir.
They are 16 feet long and lay about 3-4 inches higher than ground level. The
beds are roughly 32 inches wide, not including the logs. This kind of raised
beds make the garden look tidy and symmetrical and the natural material serves
a great aesthetic purpose at the same time as it's a great divider between
fertile soil and the paths. We have many guests wandering around in our gardens
and they can walk freely knowing that they won't step in a bed when they walk
in the area with raised beds. We find that underneath the logs habitats for all
sorts of worms, salamanders and insects are created and as the logs deteriorate
fungi and micro organisms benefit the soil and the plants. Using logs this way
is for us a good utilization of trees that need to be cleared out from dense
areas of the woods and the logs are most always either too narrow or too low
quality to use for lumber or firewood.
This type of garden beds do need some maintenance. Spruce
and fir laid on the ground won't really last more than 6 years even though we
tend to leave them until it's not much left. That means that every spring we
need to replace about 5-6 logs which involves finding the trees and hauling
them to our yard. A good garden bed log is reasonably straight through the
desired length, 5-8 inches wide and the bark needs to be peeled off. We use
wider logs too, but put them on the sawmill to narrow them down and we use the
draw knife to round the sharp corners. Peeling the bark is essential to the
longevity of the log, since bark that's left will make it rot faster.
The open areas of our gardens mainly serve the purpose that
the layout can be rearranged in accordance to what we want to grow there.
Potatoes, for example, are most practical to grow in an open area, as are
pumpkins and squash that needs a lot of space for the vines. Some of the beds
in this open area remain at the same spot year after year. When I change the
layout where the good top soil is thin, I take great care to hoe that soil from
where I want the new path to be into the area of the bed. The change in layout
does mean that what's a path one year with foot traffic compacting the soil
might be a bed the next year, but the soil is generally well drained and light
and some simple work will fluff it back up.
Using the area along the fence is a great way to both
enhance the beauty of the garden by framing it with lush growth and to use the
already existing fence for the dual purpose of supporting plants. It's also a
way to save space – cucumbers and small fruit squash such as Delicatas and can be
trained upright and pumpkins for example can be planted inside the fence in a
rich bed but trained outwards to not use the garden area for the spreading
vines. My tomato plants always grow too big for the standard cages and by
growing them along the fence and tying the vines to it, it serves the multiple
benefit of pest control, space saving and plant support.
Weed Management
We keep our garden beds well weeded and mulched. Weeds will
spread – by seeds or running roots and it is little use fighting weeds that
grow in the bed if the paths are not tended to. Where the paths are permanent,
like in the area with raised beds, we use wood chips salvaged from sites nearby
where trees been cut and chipped. In the open areas I put oak leaves in the
path that I gather the previous fall that creates a solid mat and when I'm
ready to change the layout of the beds next spring, the leaves will have broken
down and faded into the garden residue.
A well thought through garden design will make the work
enjoyable and manageable and will encourage the gardener's presence and
attention. And that, regardless of other features, can, and most surely will,
increase the yield and multiply the rewards.
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