GARDEN INFRASTRUCTURE AND TOOLS

Even indigenous pre-agriculturalists created various physical structures and tools to help with their food gathering and processing activities. For the Kalapuya, our predecessors on this land, these included drying sheds, camas ovens, digging sticks, baskets, stone knives, traps, and sundry other aids. Modern civilization has multiplied food-related infrastructure and tools many-fold, creating an almost inconceivably intricate web of buildings, machinery, transport vehicles, and the like in order to bring food from field to table. Here at Lost Valley, we strike a middle ground, attempting to create a human-scale infrastructure while using human-friendly tools to grow as much of our own food as possible and practical. Most of our infrastructure features and tools are the product in some way of modern technological advances and modern materials—but whenever they’re available and suitable, we choose “waste products” or byproducts of the industrial stream, re-using them instead of letting them become trash or immediate recycling stock.

Perhaps the most essential part of the garden infrastructure on our land is fencing. An eight-foot-high deer fence surrounds most of our growing areas; without it, deer would munch on most of our crops. Some of our Permaculture gardens use alternate, homegrown fencing materials like woven willow and cascara, but our main garden fences consist of reused metal T-stakes and lengths of fencing wire, with occasional stouter hardwood posts and gates (often fashioned from used lumber) placed at strategic intervals.

An irrigation system is also an essential part of our infrastructure (see Irrigation [0] section). Without it, we could grow crops only during the fall, winter, and spring. Alternate methods of water collection and transport could be used during the dry summer months, but most would involve very large amounts of human labor if applied to our current scale of gardening. Our creek, Anthony Creek, stops flowing during the summer, and we don’t have “water rights” to it anyway. Rainfall collection tanks that could last us all the way through the dry summer would need to be almost unimaginably huge, especially at our current scale of gardening. We could carry buckets of water up from the Willamette, a few miles away, but that would likely be one of the few activities that any of us would have time for during the summer, and would likely not yield the calories expended doing it. In short, we depend heavily on our current water supply system, and while we hope to make it more sustainable and less reliant on outside inputs (like grid electricity), abandoning it altogether would greatly limit our ability to grow many of our crops.

Buildings, sheds, and covered spaces serve a variety of important garden-related functions here, including tool storage, amendment storage, potting activities, and weighing and boxing produce. A covered, shaded outside area with tables allows us to sow seeds and prick out starts into larger containers; these are especially important when either sun or rain make performing these tasks without shelter inadvisable or impossible. Our greenhouses serve many functions already listed in the previous section; they can be used for seed-sowing and pricking out in some weather, but usually not during sunny spells (with the exception of some seed-sowing, if temperatures aren’t too high).

Shelters for many of the above activities can be built out of wooden pallets, reused building materials, and even poles from the land, and can incorporate various other green- and earth-building techniques and materials if desired. Permits are not required for structures under 200 square feet in our area, so as long as we assure that our structures are built safely and soundly, we can use a wide range of options, many of them low- or even no-cost. Most of our greenhouses, for example, are constructed of reused plastic and pre-used metal supports.

Other useful structures can include compost bins constructed from wooden pallets (if one chooses that composting method), shelters and gathering spaces for people working in the gardens (including spaces to get out of the sun or rain), bike racks (for gardens a distance from the main living areas), and the like.

Seed storage and food processing areas are also essential; here at Lost Valley, we have not always found adequate long-term ways of meeting these needs. Our seed collection would ideally live in a cool, dry environment (or even a freezer), which we have not yet created. Garlic cleaning and braiding has traditionally occurred on a covered outdoor platform, but that space is often needed for other activities. Adequate food storage facilities are also still in the process of development.

In the growing area itself, various systems can help orient newcomers as well as garden regulars. Interpretive signs, maps, and labels next to plants or beds can be helpful; we have engraved a number of vegetable and weed identification signs for use especially in the smaller educational gardens nearest the main centers of conference activity at Lost Valley. One often-used option (not currently in use at Lost Valley) that can help visitors and volunteers locate particular crops is a bed-numbering system. However, as detailed in the Beetless’ ONE AFTER WEST TWENTY-NINE [0], such a system can have its downsides as well.

To prevent soil erosion and make best use of available inputs and resources, it is important to consider the terrain when laying out the physical structure of the garden. (Many Permaculture texts and courses elaborate the basic principles of Permaculture design and give examples of their practical applications.) Strategic bed and path orientation, ditch and swale placement, and creation of windbreaks can improve drainage, reduce soil erosion, and make garden work both more efficient and more pleasant. In THE LONG ERODED PATH [0] and YOU'RE GONNA LOSE THAT SOIL [0], the Beetless enumerate some of the pitfalls of not paying attention to the terrain, to the soil, or to basic organic techniques and design principles when creating a garden. On a similar theme, SLOPE DOWN, from the Beetless APPENDIX [0], is “an intriguing but clumsy exploration of different factors in garden siting: not only slope but sun angle, shading, soil conditions, existing vegetation, historical use, drainage, proximity to buildings, integration with the landscape, and the overall ‘feel’ of the site.”

A variety of hand tools can meet most needs in the garden. These include:

1) Digging forks. These can be used for bed cultivation, for harvesting root crops and tubers, for removing plant roots when clearing a bed, for removing quackgrass and other perennial rhizomatous weeds, for breaking up clods on the surface of beds, for deflating air mattresses, and for many other uses.

2) Pitch forks. These narrow-tined forks are not suitable for soilwork, but are the best choice for handling hay, straw, and some forms of manure. They also work well as rakes to gather uprooted and cut greens from paths between garden beds, and for scooping up those greens into a wheelbarrow or onto a compost pile.

3) Garden rakes. These can be used with the tines down or with the tines up for various stages of finely cultivating and leveling beds before planting, for covering seed furrows or seed that has been broadcast, for raking up greens, etc. (In rare cases, grass rakes may work better, but only for raking up grassy materials.)

4) Digging spades. These square-ended tools are meant for just that—digging—rather than for shoveling. We don’t use them much at Lost Valley, because our shallow soils generally lend themselves better to digging forks, but they’re an important part of the double-digging used in most biointensive gardening.

5) Shovels. These pointy-tipped tools are used for scooping up and spreading materials like manure or finished compost. They can also be used for digging in the soil, but are generally not recommended for use in garden beds, where the shape and handle/blade angle of a digging spade is more suitable. In fact, digging and trenching spades are often superior to shovels for various soil-excavation operations in which shovels are more frequently used, such as for digging fruit-tree-planting holes.

6) Hoes. Various designs of hoe are suitable for various weeding and cultivating operations. The corner or tip of a hoe is also useful for creating seed-planting furrows. Because we have grown most of our crops in diverse polycultures, where more bed space is covered with desired plants and more care is necessary in weeding, we have usually pulled or cut weeds by hand rather than utilizing the broader “brush-stroke” of a hoe.

7) Trowels. These small hand tools are ideal for creating holes into which to place transplants, and sometimes also for weeding around desired plants (if used with care and at an adequate distance from roots).

8) Kamas. This Japanese hand tool (similar to a hand scythe) is used for cutting weeds. One hand holds the grass or other vegetation above the cutting zone, and the other hand draws the blade across it, as close to the ground as possible without hitting soil or rocks. The blade is kept sharp with a diamond-grit sharpener, and, if not deployed with adequate care and attention, is among the pieces of metal most likely to draw blood from garden volunteers.

9) Scythes. These truly amazing tools can clear large swathes of garden area of vegetation faster than most motorized aids. They are wielded with both arms in a gentle swinging motion; it is good to have some guidance from someone who’s used the tool before. They are sharpened with a special scythe sharpening stone. An internet search will uncover a number of testimonials to the power and grace of this tool. Believe them, because they are true.

10) Wheelbarrows, garden carts, and bike carts. Various wheeled conveyances can be enormously helpful in the garden. Single-wheeled wheelbarrows are able to transport materials to and from garden beds by navigating narrow paths between the beds. Two-wheeled flat-bottomed garden carts and bike carts can hold greater quantities of some materials and are especially suited for transporting compost buckets, boxes of harvested produce, trays of vegetable starts, and other things that fit only awkwardly into a wheelbarrow. When these transport mechanisms are out of commission, the gardeners feel it, as the Beetless remind us in CARRY THAT CRATE [0].

11) Twine, stakes, sifting screens, and miscellaneous items. Both biodegradable and nonbiodegradable twine can be useful in the garden, as can various types of stakes (which can usually be homemade), sifting screens (especially in preparing planting mix—see LOOSELY FIRM THE EDGES OF SEEDFLATS [0]—and in seed cleaning) and other tools and items not listed here. As proven by the experiences of PVC PAM [0], the number of potentially or seemingly useful garden gadgets and tools is nearly endless, especially in this age of apparently nonstop manufacturing and marketing innovation. But most gardeners will discover that some basic tools (like those listed here) are adequate for most purposes, and that having another one will not actually be helpful, but will just necessitate a larger toolshed, and probably just provide one more opportunity to be FIXING A TOOL [0].

12) Plastic buckets. No list would be complete without the omnipresent plastic bucket, which in most cases has been used for food storage in its previous life. The uses of plastic buckets are almost limitless in the garden. Even gardeners who consider plastic to be a blight upon the landscape and upon our environment may make an exception for plastic buckets. The Beetless sum up the multitudinous uses of MAXWELL'S PLASTIC BUCKET [0] better than we could ever hope to here.

A final note: proper care of tools can greatly extend their lifespan. Using a brush or handful of grass (sometimes in combination with water) to remove soil from tools can prevent the accumulation of gunk and rust which make the tool both less efficient and quicker to deteriorate. Washing, drying, and storing tools in predictable places after every day of use boosts morale while making tools both longer-lasting and easier to find. THE TOOL ON THE HILL, in the “Beetless Bootleg” APPENDIX [0], deals with the subject awkwardly, as do some garden coordinators. “The Beetless are working on a new song about tool care and the importance of putting away tools at night. This old one did more to offend garden helpers than to enlighten them.”

(forward to Pt. 5 [0]) (back to Gardening Guide [0] index)