Biointensive Gardening

Here’s a quick review of biointensive gardening. The 8 steps are to:

When you purchase hybrid seeds, it generally means that plant breeders took two different, yet related varieties of plants and cross-pollinated them in order to create a plant with improved characteristics.

Companion planting means placing plants together that grow well together (and may even help each other out), while avoiding placing plants together where one inhibits the other. The companion planting charts you can find online and books shouldn’t be treated…

Biointensive gardening advocates for intensive planting. When you position your plants close together, you can grow more food in a smaller area. Plus, the plants will blanket the soil, decreasing weed growth, erosion, and soil evaporation.

If you’re trying to grow most of your own calories, it makes sense to grow calorie-dense food, which especially points to root crops such as potatoes and parsnips. When growing biointensively, 30% of the land is often allocated for this….

Many of us get our compost materials from elsewhere, perhaps the garden center or a local farmer. And that’s okay. Most of us are gardening on the side, doing other work that enables us to purchase these inputs, thus helping…

The main biointensive method for improving soil fertility is to use compost. The purpose of compost is to bring beneficial organisms and nutrients into the soil, as well as improving water-holding capacity, drainage and aeration, among other things.

When following biointensive gardening principles, the way to relieve compaction, improve drainage and promote deeper root growth is by double digging garden beds. If you’re on especially sandy soil, you might be able to skip it. I’m on clay, which…

It’s Sunday morning, June 21st, the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. I’m doing my once a month garden maintenance, pulling the small number of weeds that made it through my leaf mulch, spraying some organic fertilizers…