by Ann Dennis

Created on: February 13, 2009

Sustainable Gardening is a slow process, but it can be done anywhere. You need to know certain things about your situation before you start and you need to have patience. You can produce food in a garden right away, but to have a sustainable garden you will have to accept that it will take years to attain something that you can call a permanently sustainable garden.

You need access to some kind of soil. The better it is to start with the sooner your garden can become'.

If your goal is to produce food then go ahead, but remember, what is removed has to be returned. That is the major mantra', if you will, for a sustainable garden. No matter what, start small. My family has access to several spots all over our 90-acre farm but we started our first garden with a 4'x 10' plot. We didn't even plant anything that first year. We put black plastic (if you do this get something 4mil or thicker) over the spot and left it for a whole year. When we came back, all that was left for us to do was the digging and structuring of beds.
I believe if you want a sustainable garden, you have to have raised beds. I say this because to keep it going you have to return nutrients to the soil and it's easier and cheaper if you can focus on small spots rather than spread the amendments all over the garden. After all when you have several beds you will have paths to walk on and they don't need to have anything extra added to them.

Black plastic saves a lot of labor. Weigh it down and leave it. When you are ready to make a bed, move the plastic to another spot for the next bed.
It can be reused for about three years.
It may have to be folded to cover a tear, but it is still useable. At some point, you may want to buy another piece but keep using the old one to go over the new so the sunlight does not degrade the new piece quite as fast.

The beds are a little labor intensive but once you have the structure you won't have to make them again.
Dig the bed up and turn over the soil, we use the trenching system. Dig a trench across the short width of the bed the width of your spade. With the first trench the soil should be piled out of the bed where you can retrieve it later, a wheel barrow is a good place because you will want that soil at the other end when you get there. Your second trench will be directly next to the first and the soil will be dumped in the first trench. You keep doing this moving down your bed to the end. At the end, you put the soil, you took out of the first trench into the last

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