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Compost is a critical element in any Regenerative Agriculture system. In our farm it is they key driver of fertility and we use the no dig approach of applying all amendments to the soil surface allowing "gravity" and worms to incorporate them into the soil.

We currently have two composting systems, one is our Chicken Run which is a deep litter system and the other is piles made from horse manure and weeds from the gardens. The chicken powered compost is much higher quality and is pictured below.

This is 400 Litres of sifted compost applied to a 10 x 0.75 m market bed. This is the first compost this bed has received, next time it will get 200-300 Litres.

The bed was broadforked to deeply aerate before the compost was applied to the top and we planted this bed with 2 rows of celery. Celery likes fertility and water.

We are currently lightly planting our beds as compared with other similar market gardens as our soils were biological dead when we started so we are going easy on the soil for now.

https://void.cat/d/M5f5ScAMZEiNU26L129j6H.webp

#rainbowomg #eattherainbow #growyourown #grownostr #regenerativeagriculture #compost #celery

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Discussion

Dan Wedge 2y ago

What kind of density are you planning on planting in there?

Evan Young 2y ago

Basically 30cm between each plant, they have space to grow outward and will get very tall eventually

Dan Wedge 2y ago

I can’t believe thats “spacing them out” thats our usual spacing.

Thank you for the response, you are literally doing tge same thing as myself, I however have had to purchase compost as our property is still bare bones

Evan Young 2y ago

Compared to other plants that is spacing them out. Beetroots are 10-15cm between rows, Bok Choi 20 cm or less

Dan Wedge 2y ago

I guess so lol. We are going heavy into cut flowers, ~65 in a 3x1m beds which will be in the 10-15cm range

While we usually do tomatoes 30-45cm apart.

Ps love live metric (I use a weird mix of imperial/metric as a Canuck)

Evan Young 2y ago

My wife is Canadian 😉 Feel free to keep asking questions and I will try to answer if I can, I am happy to help.

We do our tomatoes at 30-40 cm, but we use the tomatoe hook trellis system so they are tall and heavily pruned.

I'd love to get into flowers eventually as well.

LibertyGal 2y ago

Covid lock downs were a wonderful thing for me. It gave me the time to put in a bunch of beds and bring in some decent soil. Theystill didn't produce a ton (partially due to our bad weather and short growing season). I got rabbits last year and started dumping their bedding directly on the beds and got better results than ever before.

I'm planning on building a pseudo Johnson-Su compost reactor to mix the bunny bedding, kitchen scraps, garden scraps, and wood chips from our wood splitting/firewood cutting area. I'm hoping to up the garden even more, but the composter will take a good year to produce the high quality compost I'm hoping to add. I've also been adding some small quantities of some amendments -- worm castings, azomite, and green sand to my beds to hopefully improve things even more. I'm loving it.

I've attached a picture of building our biggest, fanciest bed and some of the stuff grown in it the past 2 years. My newer beds, built a year or 2 later, haven't produced as well. I'm still building fertility in them and optimizing the automated watering.

https://nostr.build/av/8560ae6f6f2b7bd749d0f76ce88d38ecc4dab283b1f6f30e3f999fb1c4132aab.mp4

LibertyGal 2y ago

several of my pictures didn't post for some reason.

LibertyGal 2y ago

Erin Two Chicks Homestead 2y ago

My zapper is broken but I love this. I really feel a lot of positive came out of the lockdowns for us. We did so many things we may have not done for awhile. And really grew mentally and as a homestead

LibertyGal 2y ago

I felt bad for the big city folk locked in their apartments, but I got so much done around the yard and I finally mostly healed from adrenal problems I'd been fighting for more than a decade. I loved it, but felt guilty about loving it.

Erin Two Chicks Homestead 2y ago

Yes I understand that

Evan Young 2y ago

While I would never say I had a wonderful time in the very extended Lockdowns we had to endure, I certainly did not waste any time while we were in them. Our market garden was built with sweat equity and repurposed garbage.

Your compost system sounds great except for the woodchips, they will take far longer than everything else to transmute into compost. I would use them in the very bottom of your pile to allow airflow from underneath.

Azomite and Green sand are both great mineral and magnetic amendments for your soil too, the raised bed looks great. You really don't need a huge garden to cater for one household