When it comes to growing vegetables on your land, you can find numerous approaches to managing the plot, financing its cultivation and reaping returns in both money and yield. You can always run a homestead or farm as an individual or family. But you can also do so as a cooperative or community.
When it comes down to it, many financial and social structures exist to help projects flourish. But good organization of the landscape is essential. The division of your land into garden plots, triads, beds and spots can help create a layout conducive to different forms of social organization.
In this article and the next, I want to explore both the community garden concept and the current popular model of land organization. These we’ll compare to the typical market garden organization.
We’ll also look at some of the underlying questions community gardeners could ask themselves to better manage their patches of growing soil.
Read more: Here are 6 ways to increase your community’s food security in the upcoming winter.
How are community gardens spatially organized?
Most community gardens have a large space of anywhere between .25 to .5 to 1 acre of cultivated land. Some very old and large community gardens are actually many acres in size. However, most garden plots are about 5 by 10 or 10 by 10 feet in size. More advanced growers may even find plots up to 600 square feet.
Regardless of size, though, community gardens are often divided into plots, with alleys and paths leading between them.
On the other hand, a typical market garden is organized by larger plots subdivided into beds. Our particular style of market garden design also divides plots into triads of three beds each. Somewhere between three to six triads make up a plot (depending on your scale of operation).
The big difference is that community gardens leave bed making, bed architecture and overall layout of beds within plots up to individual gardeners. For a market garden, on the other hand, this is a very specific determination executed, most often, by a single grower.
So a community garden’s diversity of gardening strategies can prevent some of benefits that market gardeners enjoy.
In community gardens, individuals will have an island-like plot amidst a network of paths, with adjacent island-like plots. Everyone grows what they like. Management is often left to the individual, save some places where the entire piece of land is plowed and tilled each year.
This model prevents a lot of the regenerative benefits of new land management strategies that professional growers typically employ. But moving toward a Permabed system could help community garden’s grow more with less.
Read more: Is a Permabed simply a raised bed? No, there are some key differences.
What are the benefits of Permabeds, or permanent raised garden beds? And how can a community garden benefit from the Permabed model?
First of all, a raised Permabed is never destroyed at the end of the year. The bed remains raised at approximately 6 inches above the ground, with an overall width of about 3 to 4 feet, including the path (for smaller plots, like a community gardener or home garden).
The raised bed reduces compaction and improves soil life. This preserves micro-organisms like beneficial fungi and bacteria. The permanent model also means the land is more stable from year to year. And better organization allows crop rotation and a reduction of disease.
Community gardens that choose to divide their entire plot into 50- or 100-foot long raised beds at 4-foot widths would gain a lot in overall soil health. But they would also achieve wonders for efficiency of irrigation and disease management.
And these are just a few of the benefits Permabeds can bring to land health in community gardens. In my next article, we’ll look at some of the management benefits a good organization strategy brings to shared growing spaces. We’ll also dig into how you, too, can apply Permabed system design to your community garden.
Grow On,
Zach
