Traditional vegetable gardens require an enormous amount of efforts and attention – weeding, feeding and strict planting schedules. There can be the issue of seasonality, allowing beds unwind through the cooler months producing almost nothing. Then we’re told to plant green manure crops, add inorganic fertilizers and chemicals to adjust imbalanced soils. It has a considerable time, dedication and a year-round persistence for grow your own food the standard way.
But should it should be that difficult?
Allow me to ask you this question. Does a forest need to think how to grow? Does its soil have to be turned every season? Does someone come along regularly and plant seeds or take pH tests? Does it get weeded or sprayed with toxic chemicals?
Of course not!

Traditional growing vegetables techniques are dedicated to problems. Have you pointed out that gardening books are full of solutions to fix problems? I would be a traditional gardener for countless years and that i discovered that the reply to most problems simply caused a new list of problems. Quite simply, the situation with problems is always that problems create more problems.

Let’s have a look at a common traditional gardening practice i will show you the way a single issue will escalate in to a whole host of problems.

Imagine a traditional vegetable garden, planted with rows of assorted vegetables. There are fairly large bare patches between your vegetables. To a normal gardener, a bare patch is simply bare patch. But to an ecologist, a bare patch can be an empty niche space. An empty niche space is merely a party invitation for first time life forms to adopt up residency. Nature doesn’t tolerate empty niche spaces along with the most successful niche space fillers are weeds. That’s that of a weed is within ecological terms – a niche space filler. Weeds are extremely good colonizing plants. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be called weeds.

Now returning to our story. Weeds will grow inside the empty niche spaces. Quite often there are way too many weeds to pick out individually, hence the traditional gardener uses a hoe to make them to the soil. I have read in numerous gardening books, even organic gardening books, that the hoe is your closest friend. So the message we are getting is always that by using a hoe could be the solution to an issue.

However, I have to explain to you how by using a hoe actually results in a new group of problems. Firstly, turning soil excites weed seeds, creating a new explosion of weeds. And secondly, turning soil upsets the soil ecology. The top layer of soil is mostly dry and structureless. By turning it, you happen to be placing deeper structured soil on top and putting the structureless soil underneath. After a while, this rock band of structureless soil widens. Structureless soil has much less expensive moisture holding capacity, hence the garden now needs more water to hold the plants alive.

Furthermore problem, structureless soil cannot pass its nutrients on the plants as effectively. The garden now also needs incorporating fertilisers. Many fertilisers get rid of the soil biology that is essential in building soil structure and plant nutrient availability. The soil will ultimately develop into a defunct substance that doesn’t possess the correct balance of nutrients to develop fully developed foods. The foods will in fact lack minerals and vitamins. This problem has happened in modern-day agriculture. Dr Tim Lobstein, Director from the Food Commission said. “… today’s agriculture does not enable the soil to enrich itself, but depends on chemical fertilisers which don’t replace the wide array of nutrients plants and humans need.” Over the past 60 years commercially grown foods have experienced a tremendous cut in nutrient and mineral content.

Is it possible to observe how we started while using problem of weeds, but wound up with the newest problems of lower water-holding capacity and infertile soils. And eventually, we’ve the potentially serious problem of growing food with low nutrient content. Traditional gardening techniques only ever make an effort to fix the symptom rather than the main cause.

However, you will find there’s solution! We must make use of a technique that combines pest ecology, plant ecology, soil ecology and crop management right into a method that addresses the causes of these problems. This technique must be efficient enough being economically viable. It must also manage to produce enough food, per given area, to compete against traditional techniques.

I have been previously testing an ecologically-based way of growing food for several years. This method uses zero tillage, zero chemicals, has minimal weeds and requires a part of the physical attention (when compared to traditional growing vegetables). It also produces more than once more, per given area, and provides food each day of the season.

My ecologically-based garden mimics nature so how the garden works just like a natural ecosystem. Succession layering of plants (just like we view in natural ecosystems) offers natural bug elimination. It also naturally eliminates the need for crop rotation, resting beds or green manure crops. Soil management is addressed naturally, and the result is how the soil’s structure and fertility get richer and richer, year after year. Another good thing about this technique is automatic regeneration through self-seeding. This occurs naturally as dormant seeds germinate; filling empty niche spaces with desirable plants, and not weeds.

Unfortunately, the greatest challenge using this method faces is convincing traditional gardeners of the benefits. Like many industries, the gardening industry gets stuck in doing things some way. The ecologically-based method requires such little human intervention that, i think, many individuals is certain to get frustrated while using not enough being forced to control what’s happening. Naturally people like to adopt control of their lives, but this process you are allowing nature to consider the reins. It’s a test of faith in quite simple natural laws. However, with me these natural laws are 100% reliable.

Another excuse that traditional gardeners may not similar to this way is that it takes away all of the mysticism for being a professional. The thing is that, this method can be so simple that anybody, anywhere in the world, under any conditions, are able to do it. And for a veteran gardener it might sometimes be quite threatening when an embarrassingly simple solution arrives.

We’ve without a doubt that will be the approach we take to will probably be growing food in the future. It’s just commonsense. Why wouldn’t we make use of a method that produces often times more food using a fraction with the effort? I know it will take a little while to convince folks that growing food is actually very instinctual and, however with persistence and proper explanation, individuals will embrace using this method.

…eventually!