The Integrated Garden Farm System
by Andrew W. Lee
September 2003, Acres U.S.A.

   I would like to help create a new food production model. We can call it the obtainable, sustainable, integrated garden farm. The integrated garden farm I envision will have four components: the land, nature, the gardener and the families who will eat the food grown there.
   The centerpiece of the integrated garden system is the boxed, raised-bed gardening method. It has been a standard for centuries, and has been further developed by garden writer Jeff Ball in the early 1980s. The heavy board sides on the raised beds provide the foundation for trellises, growing tunnels, and livestock fencing.
   Jeff Ball talks about this gardening method in his book 60 Minute Gardening (Rodale Press). The system is very well displayed in the Jeff’s Yardening video series, produced by the National Gardening Association in Burlington, Vermont.
   The boxed, raised-bed garden method relies on super fertile soil, double- dug beds, and complex planning and planting schemes. The method uses plastic tunnels, high-rise trellises, drip irrigation, and intensive plantings to produce super yields of produce. This garden can provide some of the meats and all of the fresh vegetables a family can eat, on less that 1,000 square feet of land per family per season (using the national average family size of 2.65 persons).
   One-third of the garden contains vegetables, berries, herbs and flowers. Another third contains grain-producing cover crops that also provide compostable biomass. The remaining third of the garden has portable fencing for livestock pens.
   A significant percentage of the feed requirements for the livestock (up to 30 percent) can be grown right in the garden. This includes mature cover crops, excess vegetables and fruits, spent garden plants and weeds from the garden beds. Even kitchen scraps from the garden members make good animal feed.
   Pigs and chickens, unlike humans, do not recognize non-crop plants as weeds or kitchen scraps as garbage. They eat everything, including weed seeds and pest insects. Bedding for the animals can be straw from mature cover crops such as cereal grains or leaves from the yards of the community.
   The garden system operates from early spring to late fall. Piglets are purchased at 20 pounds weight in May. They are fed out to 220 pounds and harvested in October. Day-old chicks are raised to 4-5 pound size, and harvested as fryers and broilers after eight weeks. After butchering and packaging, the meats can be held in the family’s freezer for use in the winter.
   Because livestock is only grown in the summer months, housing needs are minimal. Pigs and chickens live in small huts that can be positioned at bed ends for easy access to the fenced bed areas. Throughout the season, the pens are rotated weekly for even distribution of manures and for weed-disease-pest control.
   In the integrated garden system we can use a rotating-plot system. The pig pen this year will be in cover crops next year. This year’s cover-cropped beds will be next year’s vegetable beds, and so on.
   The key to the super fertility of the garden beds is the livestock manure. One feeder pig will produce nearly 2.25 tons of nutrient-rich manure in six months. A laying hen will produce only 100 pounds of manure per year, but it is high in available nitrogen. Chicken manure is an extremely fertile activator for the compost pile.
   Nearly 100 percent of the value of this animal manure can be recovered. Most of it can be collected in a few minutes each day and delivered to the compost piles, Manure and urine that can’t be collected will remain on the soil, providing nutrients for next year’s cover crops.
   The compost, high in available macro- and micronutrients, will be a valuable soil amendment for the following year’s vegetable and cover crops. Because compost is so valuable, it deserves special attention from the gardener. Composting in the integrated garden system takes place in a series of bins designed to fill one of the boxed, raised beds.
   In a 4-by-50-foot boxed, raised bed there is room for 12 compost bins, each measuring 4-feet square and 4-feet high. Gather the materials in alternating bins, using eight of the 12 bins for raw materials. As decomposition occurs, the material will shrink, allowing the total from eight bins to be combined into only four bins. Turn the material every month with a pitchfork. The process continues throughout the summer. By fall, four bins will be brimming with nearly 10 cubic yards of finished compost. This is enough to lay a 1-inch layer on the 2,400 square feet of land that is to be used for vegetable production next year. Thanks to the super fertile soil, this 2,400 square feet of land can provide all of the vegetable needs for 10 families.
   Spread the compost on the growing beds in the fall and cover it with leaf or straw mulch for the winter. By spring planting time, the earthworms will carry most of the compost into the soil, adding more than 5 percent organic matter to the top 6-inch layer. This gives the super fertility required for successful intensive vegetable production.
   In the spring, the leaf or straw mulch that is still on the surface can be raked off the beds and put in the compost bins to start another round of compost making. The seeds or transplants can go directly into the soil without plowing or rotary tilling. This elimination of tillage is a giant step forward in decreasing labor requirements and in promoting excellent soil health.
   Throughout the growing season, the garden’s soil is never bare to the sun, wind or rain. It is always protected, either by mulch, food plants, or cover crops. Erosion, compaction, crusting and soil degeneration is negligible in these protected beds. Even the livestock sections of the garden are protected by bedding and leaf mulch during most of the year.
   You may be starting the integrated garden system on land that needs immediate soil improvements. In such a case, you may need to bring in compost materials and soil amendments. Asking the garden members to bring in leaves, yard waste and kitchen waste will be a big first step in getting enough raw materials to make good compost.
   Fertility and tilth can also be enhanced dramatically by adding earthworms to the soil. It’s possible to increase the earthworm population a great deal by simply mulching the soil with leaves or straw for a season or two. Sometimes, however, that takes too long. A faster way to increase the garden’s earthworm population is to grow them as a “crop” in one of the raised beds.
   To do this, dig out about 6 inches of soil from one of the boxed beds. Install a wire screen, then put the soil over it to refill the bed. Then seed the bed with a few thousand earthworms. The screen will keep worms from escaping. The following year, the bed can be used for vegetable production by removing the wire screen. Or, you can leave this one bed in the rotation as an “earthworm nursery.”
   To provide food for the earthworm nursery, install rabbit hutches above the boxed raised bed. The gardener moves the hutches along the bed weekly. As the rabbit manure and food bits fall to the ground the earthworms eat them. Three hutches, containing two rabbits each, will fertilize the whole bed in a season. This will create a super rich soil that will exceed all expectations for vegetable yields in the future.
   Earthworms have a 90-day reproduction cycle. In healthy soil, with plenty to eat, they are astonishingly prolific. By the end of the first summer, the 2,000 or 3,000 “seed” worms will have multiplied to many thousands, enough to seed every bed in the integrated garden system.
   It’s a simple matter to sift through the soil above the screen wire and take out the earthworms. Save the super-rich castings to fertilize plants, or for mixing potting soil. After taking the earthworms out of the propagation bed, remove the screen and store it for use in another season. If you leave the screen in place, any earthworms that are trapped above it during the winter will freeze unless you cover them with at least two feet of straw or leaves.
   In the fall, after seeding the rest of the garden beds with earthworms, cover the beds with leaf mulch to protect the worms and the soil. The worms will burrow several feet deep to survive the winter and will continue to multiply rapidly in following years.

    Andy Lee is an internationally known speaker, writer, teacher, and practi-tioner of “holistic enterprise farming and gardening.” He is the author of Backyard Market Gardening: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Selling What You Grow, from which this article is excerpted, and is co-author with his wife, Patricia Foreman, of Chicken Tractor and Day Range Poultry. All are available from the Acres U.S.A. bookstore.