Over the past ten years or so my husband has been planting a fairly traditional garden. Each year he tills the ground with a tractor then digs out rows to plant his seeds and transplants. With my visions of permaculture I of course wasn’t satisfied with this approach.

Tilling with a tractor compresses the soil and also damages the beneficial microbes and earthworms in the soil. Untilled soil makes healthier soil. If you think about how a forest works, mother nature deposits organic matter in the form of leaves and other dead vegetation. The floor of the forest gets built up with nutrients continually. Which is kind of the opposite of how conventional gardening and agriculture goes.

Another one of the downsides of this garden is that watering is a huge pain. The garden is on a slope, so watering involves standing at the top of the garden at the head of each row and letting the water trickle down the row. This gets really time consuming, especially once you’ve mulched the rows, slowing down the water flow.

Chad agreed to let me try to come up with a new design that would be no-till and make watering easier. This was my first design for the garden plot:

It’s pretty, isn’t it? I was going to incorporate both drip irrigation and perennials into this design. However, in the meantime we created a bunch of cool garden beds in our front yard, aka, “the Low Garden.” This meant that we didn’t need quite as much space in “the High Garden” (what we now call the garden plot in question). We also weren’t sure how extensively we wanted to add perennials, shrubs and trees to this plot yet.

Meanwhile the weeds in the High Garden had settled in. With our last frost date rapidly approaching, I was anxious to decide what kind of design to go with and get the plot prepared for planting. We spent a couple of hours looking at the plot, talking and kicking around ideas. We both agreed that we should only plant about half of the space, but none of our design ideas seemed quite right. Then I suggested using the existing rows, NOT tilling, just digging them wider and deeper, and connecting them so that you could set up the hose to flow at the high point of the garden and water the whole thing at once. Both of us got excited and knew this was the right solution for us this year. And later I had to point out that this was one of the permaculture principles in action: “Apply self-regulation and accept feedback”

Chad started whacking weeds with an old-fashioned manual weed whacker and I wet down the rows and started digging them out. Before getting them wet, they were like hot city cement; after they were like cool melty ice cream. Guess that is an advantage of having a lot of sand in your soil! It was hard work but we had fun doing it.

Eventually I let Chad take over with the shovel and I filled in the garden plan, rotating plants from where they were last year and figuring out companion planting groupings. This is our plan for the High Garden:

And here’s what our beautiful garden canvas looks like, almost ready for planting:

It just needs to be amended with sheep manure and then we are ready to roll! Since we are in a dryland climate, we will plant our annual vegetables in the low rows which are about 2 feet wide, 6 or so inches deep and 27 feet long. And we will mulch heavily!

Even though I really loved the first design I had come up with, the interesting shapes of it and the curves, I think this new design is better for our current needs and might even be better period from a watering stand point.