Since beds and alleys are complimentary they will be discussed together.

During the oil shocks of the 1970s, lots of people began to take an interest in growing food at home and it was easy for me to put together a night class for adults. We put up lights in the school garden and started experimenting with “French Intensive” beds of about the same dimensions I use now but without the wide alleys. Alan Chadwick and John Jeavons had introduced the French Intensive idea to California and it was getting lots of attention in the gardening press at that time. They started in Palo Alto. Work continues today at Ecology Action in Willits, and if I am putting things together correctly, also at the University of California at Santa Cruz. At that time Mr. Jeavons published a book, "How to Grow More Vegetables" with the subtitle, "than you ever thought possible on less land than you ever imagined". It has gone through several editions and has sold a half-million copies. Any gardener or small farmer interested in growing on intensive beds would do well to obtain his book. It is filled with excellent line drawings and the information on individual food crops is very detailed and not available elsewhere. You may order the book directly from Ecology Action (USA phone: 707.459.0150).

I first became acquainted with raised intensive beds when I was student greenhouse and nursery manager of the horticulture unit at the state college in San Luis Obispo, California. In the floricultural industry, crops such as carnations and chrysanthemums were grown in greenhouses on permanently constructed concrete beds filled with potting soil. (This was in 1959 and these crops, for the most part, are now being grown in South America where labor is much cheaper and rules governing environmental degradation and worker safety are much more lax, if there are any at all.) Today, wherever flowers are grown whether in the field or in the greenhouse, raised beds are the standard--the regular way it’s done.

Here’s a cross-sectional drawing of our beds and alleys as we now have most of them configured:

Fifteen feet is allowed for a bed and alley--roughly 7 ˝ or 8 feet for the bed, including the shoulders, and the difference for the alley. I’ve found that the best configuration for the drip lines is 1 foot apart, but drip irrigation may not be needed at all if just vegetables are grown, particularly where it rains in the summer. Drip lines are essential with floral crops because the weight of residual overhead water on the foliage results in many flowers getting knocked over.

We shoveled up all our beds by hand, the equivalent of twenty 150-foot beds, as we experimented with their configuration over a period of years. An immediate advantage of building the beds is that the gardener doubles-up on the best existing surface soil on the main crop-growing areas of the beds. One can see an immediate advantage to this by observing a piece of land where the soil has been lightly pushed around in the course of grading. The grass is much taller and greener where the soil has been filled. It's short and pale on the cuts. Most food crop plants will make satisfactory growth on poor soils ruined by plowing. Because of this, food crops can be expected to do extra well where the best soil has been doubled up on the beds. This has been our experience.

The bed shoulders are important transitional areas between the enriched soil on the beds and the more raw soil in the alleys. In ecological terms these represent “ecotones” the transitional areas between ecosystems and, on a smaller scale, between plant communities such as woodlands and grasslands. Biologists consider these as rich areas where a lot more “happens” than happens in either community alone; indeed, perhaps even more than happens in both the communities combined. In the garden or farm there is endless room for experimentation of good uses for the shoulders. In the early summer, we are able to extend the cool season a bit by spacing corn plants or sunflowers, say 4 or 5 feet apart to act as nurses that protect the main crop on the bed. Last year this worked well for keeping summer Swiss chard sweet and tender. Quick crops such as radishes and beets are an excellent choice for growing on the shoulders since they are removed before they would get in the way of harvesting the main crop. This year on our east-west running beds we are experimenting to find the limit on summer potato growth by planting them on the north shoulder in the shade of other plants.

Many people who enjoy gardening by the rules will say that one must never step on the beds for fear of compacting the soil. This is not correct. In fact, if beds are not pressed down with repeated trampling during construction, failure is nearly certain. Capillary water will not move through loose soil and earth, and seeds and fresh transplants will quickly dry. This "rule" has fostered construction of beds narrower than they really should be for efficient use of space and for the protection from hazards such as sun and wind that plants enjoy by close association. It has also fostered the construction of inefficiently short beds, say only 25 to 30 feet long, adding substantially to the number of management units on the hand-scale farm.

Stepping into the beds for planting, weeding, and harvesting, particularly with just one foot is not a problem. Good soil has pore spaces and earthworm passages--alternately filled with air and water. It is the sopping wet mulch and soil that should not be stepped upon. Forcing out the air and water (called "puddling" by professionals), might cause the mulch to compact to such an extent as to support weed growth. To resolve this problem, I divide my 150-foot long beds with narrow strips of old carpeting spaced every 25 feet as foot crossings in order to avoid indiscriminate trampling.

Every shoulder, depending on the compass orientation of the bed, has a particular “aspect”, that is north, south, east or west, which can greatly affect plant growth. South facing shoulders will be much warmer than north facing ones and west shoulders will be warmer than east facing ones. When all the plants of a particular kind are planted with a similar or neutral aspect, as is the case with more conventional kinds of agriculture, there is little opportunity for the farmer to learn much about the reasons for success or failure; there needs to be some sort of comparison. Without such comparisons, not just with aspect but with other variables as well, such as planting times and proximity to other plants that may compete with or benefit the crop plant in question, the reasons for greater or lesser degrees of success are mostly matters of conjecture.

We are experimenting with planting single rows of alfalfa and clover near the base of the shoulders and encouraging its more or less permanent establishment. These, of course, are innoculated with appropriate cultures of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and a hoped for additional benefit is to permanently establish these microorganisms throughout the garden as well. These legumes will scatter their seeds into the alleys where they establish themselves in a somewhat spotty fashion even without summer irrigation and provide a continuing source of nitrogen-rich mulching material. The small seeds of these legumes are unlikely to push their way up through the thick mulch on the beds where they could compete with the crop plants. An interesting characteristic of alfalfa and clover seeds is that they remain viable over a very long period of time. A small percentage will not sprout even under the most favorable conditions after sowing or self-sowing but remain viable to sprout in the years to come. This is just what the whole systems gardener interested in self-organization is looking for. She lets the system do her work.

When people visit our little farm and notice the very wide alleys, they at first seem puzzled by the apparent waste of so much space so some explaining is in order here.

It’s likely that if our water well delivered enough to keep the whole garden going during our hot, dry summers I might have spaced the beds closer together. But having discovered the convenience and benefits of these wide alleys I’d never go back to tight spacing no matter how much water might become available. Let’s remind ourselves that these are intensive beds, intensive in inputs, intensive in labor, and abundant in their yields, all of which make access very important. At the very least the alleys need to be wide enough to accommodate a hand drawn wagon or cart. Mulch needs to be carted in, along with flats of baby plants from the nursery for transplanting. After planting, they need hand watering for a week or more while their little roots get out into the surrounding soil. The plantings need regular inspections and almost always there will be some weeds that need to be pulled.

Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that a 7.5 x 150 foot bed is planted entirely to potatoes, which yield as much as one pound per square foot, and access is only by narrow footpaths. The small scale farmer, not having use of a tractor drawn potato digger, would then be faced with the task of hauling out a thousand pounds of potatoes in buckets or crates by hand. They invented wheels for jobs like this--it would be most imprudent to work with hands and feet alone.

In organic gardening circles, people say that a given size of garden needs an equal amount of land to support it with composting or mulching materials. I would say the latter is a minimum. On our own two-acre farm there is roughly one half-acre in beds, another half-acre in alleys to support the beds with mulch (should our supply of delivered grass clippings fail due to energy shortages) and a third half-acre in lawn and trees that can also be used as a source of mulch materials. The remaining uncropped half-acre is in buildings, driveway, access road, nursery, and outdoor storage. Thus, there is a 2:1 ratio of supportive, mulch growing land to land that is directly productive.

The reader may wonder if it might not be easier to farm the whole acre-and-a-half more extensively and not have to trouble one’s self with cutting and moving mulch. I would say that the main reason intensive beds are more favorable is that mulch, water, and labor are more efficiently applied to a half-acre of intensive beds than an acre-and-a-half of extensively planted land. Weeds alone might make reasonably good mulch so the gardener is able to make good use of weeds on 2/3 of her land rather than have to fight them. Even when mulch is contaminated with lots of weed seed, few come through if the mulch is deep enough and properly applied. Transplanting into a fresh layer of mulch gives crop plants a one or two month jump on weeds. Where they do come through, hand pulling is easy in the loose, highly organic soil that develops under the mulch. We rarely use hoes or any sort of tools for weeding our beds.

A purpose of tillage not mentioned in the “No-Tillage” section is to clear the land of previous crop residues that would interfere with the planting of the crop that follows. Alleys serve this purpose and allow the farmer to do a better and faster job of it. There are occasions where we have replanted a new crop on the very day the old crop was removed, although we are mostly in not that much of a rush. In managing these residues, the killed crop and attendant dead weeds are mowed and the rough residues tossed into the alleys. Hand pulling and hand digging of anything green is sometimes in order to prevent regrowth. Fresh mulch is applied (sometimes a single mulching will serve for two crops) and the new crop planted in. Conventional practices usually take weeks or months of preparation but in this way the process can be cut to a matter of days.

The alleys are also used to grow crops for mulching, or for just improving the poorer alley soil. I’ve used wheat or ryegrass with a legume such as white clover or alfalfa for this but there are lots of other possibilities--more on this in the next section. Birdseed, which usually contains lots of millet, makes a very heavy crop and the price is considerably less than buying conventional cover crop seed commercially. Here in our Mediterranean climate we only grow in the alleys during the cool of the year for water conservation purposes. Next fall we're planning to seed all our alleys with large-seeded winter grain--wheat, barley, oats--whether heavily mulched or not. These large, high-energy, dense seeds are able to push their way through quite a deep layer of mulch while the smaller seeds of many weedy species will be suppressed. We keep our alleys mowed to facilitate foot traffic, and wheat and barley hold up particularly well under mowing.

After enjoying working in a garden with spacious alleys I'd never go back to squeezing between closely-spaced beds or rows.

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Whole Systems Agriculture ~ Madera, California ~ ©2005
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