The ten minute garden continues to be very little work for an amazing amount of space. On two days within the same week I used a pitch fork to break up the soil and pile it into a heap in a four by four foot square bed. Make no mistake, I still have my huge garden, but I just want to see how much a person can do with as little as a 10 minute commitment.
Looking at how much I could do in just 10 minutes, I decided my bed would be a standard 4x8 foot bed and I would use the fork on another day to expand it. Voila! I have a remarkable amount of space with just two 10-minute days – that even surprised me at how little time I had spent.
In all fairness, this requires some plot of dirt that was already bare. Anyone starting with a grassy spot would have had to use 10 minutes to put newspapers down and pour bags of top soil over them to kill the grass, or the previous fall weigh down a tarp or something to kill the grass where the garden could be approached and forked up in two 10 minute periods.
Still, it proves a substantial space can be tilled on a couple mild march days, and the soil heaped up in the middle of a bed. The heaping is very important. It does what farmers do in fields with what is called a field cultivator. The surface area of the soil is raised and the amount of surface area is increased – both create good drying conditions in the spring when not all days are warm enough to dry out flat ground enough to plant.
The sun and spring winds will dry the mound of dirt faster and later it can be shaped into a bed and planted.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
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