Wisconsin Public Television University Place Garden Expo 2012  Noel Valdes Vegetable Production Using Open Raised Beds  February 11, 2012 UP684   cc >> Thank you very much for allowing me to speak to you today. My name is Noel Valdes. I live out in Cambridge. I think most of you know where Cambridge is, but it's 20 miles east of here. You just get on the Beltline, head east. The first town you hit is Cambridge, Wisconsin. I'm a home gardener. I'm not a horticulturalist or a professional gardener in any way, but I talk about my garden and the raised bed method I use of growing vegetables. It's proven to me and a lot of people to be a very efficient and sustainable method of gardening. So I'll jump right into my slide show. 

The talk is called Open Raised Bed Gardening: Growing More Food in Less Space. There's a picture of my garden, there's my neighbors behind me, and you can see the open beds that I'm talking about here that are just mounded soil in my good old glacial till that I have in southern Wisconsin that most of us have here. The method of growing in raised beds is such that unlike linear rows where, the traditional gardens where you grow in linear rows, you're growing a cover of a crop that just fills the space of the bed with foliage once it's mature. So it cuts down on weeds. It cuts down on the amount of water that you need. It's a very efficient method of getting a lot of food production out of a very small space. And I'm talking about open beds. If you're here to learn about containers, you're in the wrong class because I'm not talking about boxed beds. I'm not talking about containerized beds. I'm not talking about raised beds where you bring the soil in from another source. 

I'm talking about not this, not this, not this, and not this. [LAUGHTER] Okay? These beds can be great and they can be extremely useful, these containerized beds, if you may have a disability, you may not be able to bend down, you may have bad soil that your soil in an urban situation, you don't know what's underneath the ground or you're over gravel or bedrock or something like that. Those containers are ideal for that type of gardening. But what I'm saying is that in terms of absolute production of crop and getting the most out with the least input, these open raised beds are far more sustainable and far more efficient. Here's a little statistic I like to throw out there. There's a lot of grass there, and I think everybody knows that we probably grow a little too much lawn in this country. And the statistic you see, 50 million acres of turf grass grown in the United States. Triple the acreage of irrigated crops. Here in Wisconsin, you drive down by Janesville or you drive up by Stevens Point and you will see these huge overhead irrigation systems. You fly over Colorado, you will see circles a quarter mile across of irrigated land. 

The same thing in California, and that's a lot of land, but you take all of that land, triple it, that's how much grass we grow in this country. And some people think it might be a little bit of a waste of resources, so I'm saying, hey, turn some of that turf grass into garden space. There's my neighbor's house. There's my garden cut right out of the lawn in my backyard. The methods that I'm talking about have been around for a long, long time. I didn't invent this. All I'm doing is showing you what I'm doing with it. But these raised bed gardens, the Chinese did it, the Greeks did it, both the Mayan and Aztecs civilizations in Mexico and Central America thrived, and they had cities of a quarter million people were living off of these raised bed gardens. French market gardens is where this really came into modern play. Paris, about 200 years ago, was ringed by small market farmers, what we would call today truck farmers or small market growers, and they had a system using almost totally raised beds. 

They fed their beds with manure, obviously oxes and horses which is what they used in those days, and so they were able to get huge production and keep huge production going in intensive ways using manure as the feed. I don't use manure. I use plant compost as my feed, but the principle is the same. There's a person that, if you're really interested in to this technology, named Alan Chadwick. He's a British professor who got a fellowship to the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1960. And he came to California, codified this raised bed thing, and it really took off in California first. He could be considered the founder of what you would call the open raised bed technique of intensive vegetable growing. This is a very important point I'd like to make, especially if you're a beginning garden this is extremely important. We all learn our way as we garden, but if you're starting out in gardening, don't bite off more than you can chew. Don't start out with a huge garden. 

You will be disappointed. You won't be able to keep up with the weeds. You won't be able to keep up with the harvesting. You won't be able to keep up with the insect control. You'll get mad, you'll get discouraged, and you may quit gardening. That's not a good thing. So the principle with this or any type of garden, you start small, get your hands around it, get it under control, and then expand and then grow as you see what Alan says you get it right and then grow more. Alan Chadwick died a few years ago, but his legacy is still alive with this group called Grow Biointensive, well, Ecology Action, there's their website, Grow Biointensive. That's their garden in north of San Francisco. And you can see that there is not anything there, other than path land, that doesn't have something growing on it. 

They use a lot of trellising. They use a lot of vertical gardening. They rotate through. Of course they're in California so they grow 12 months a year. We're lucky here in Wisconsin. We get a vacation in the wintertime. [LAUGHTER] But the principles are exactly the same. And this is a book. I'm sure a lot of people have seen this book. It's written by a guy named John Jeavons who was actually an associate and the direct linear descendant of the philosophies of Alan Chadwick. 

And this is kind of considered the bible or the how-to for this raised bed system of gardening. It tells you plant spaces, how to set up your beds, how to maintain your garden, etc. And you wouldn't be in this room if what I don't say in this slide were not true. Gardening is expanding and growing. Especially food gardening. Especially growing your own food. That's the fastest growing segment of the gardening industry right now. And the people that run garden centers and the people that do garden catalogs will all tell you that their money today is coming from vegetables and food production. It's not coming from ornamentals. It's not coming from trees. 

It's not coming from landscaping. It's from growing your own food. That's the fastest growing segment of the garden industry. And that's the segment that was dying for years and years and years. Back in World War II, back in 1943, the United States grew over 40% of its production of live food, of produce, in their backyards in the victory gardens. Of course, that fell off and now it's down less than 10%, it's about 8%, but it's growing again and people are getting back into the garden for the reason that I listed here. The farm markets are booming. Here in Madison we have a perfect example, and even the little small towns have big farm markets. Urban gardens. I grew up in Detroit, and that could be a good or a bad thing, but Detroit ran into problems, as people know, but Detroit has more community gardens and more land under cultivation than any city in the United States, and that's because the people, after the world left them behind, just said, hey, we'll take matters into our own hands and we'll start growing our own food. 

And you'll see that in a lot of cities, inner-city people saying we're going to grow our own food. You'll see it in rural areas as well where there's all kinds of interest in growing your own food. Also, people are questioning where their food comes from. There's questions about big agriculture and whether they're doing the right thing or not. I won't get too much into politics, but if you want to talk to me on the side, I'm more than happy to tell you my opinion. But younger see the positive environmental aspects of gardening. Gardening is a good thing. We all know this. We live in Wisconsin. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, doesn't matter where you go, you see miles and miles and miles and miles of corn and soy beans. 

if it's not corn and soy beans, it's soy beans and corn. It's not the way the world should go around. It's totally dependent on petrochemicals. It's totally dependent on the oil industry. It's totally dependent on nonsustainable inputs to keep it alive. What's going to happen when it crashes? So there is an argument out there that the most single sustainable thing you can do as a human being is grow your own food. And it's a good argument. I say it's the second most sustainable thing you can do. The most sustainable thing you can do as a human is have children, obviously, because you wouldn't sustain the race if you didn't do that. But it's a very ecologically sound method, and it's a very healthy method of taking care of yourself. 

And the beds that I'm talking about, the method that I'm talking about, it grows more food in less space, it doesn't require a rototiller, it doesn't require any power tools, it's kind of like gardening in general. It's how much you want to put into it as far as how you do it but gardeners are creative, and if you can be creative, you can keep your costs extremely minimal with this type of system. And it definitely conserves water and other resources. There is some melons that I have growing up. I do a lot of trellising in my garden, and because I'm growing in an intensive space, I have to figure out ways to get the most out of the space. You can see here I've got potatoes, but here there are some pepper plants that are just coming up, and when those get mature, they will fill up that whole garden space with green, and what that does is it reduces the amount of water that I need to put in those beds versus running a linear row of plants, and it reduces the amount of weeding because the plants shade out the weeds. So I have a big garden, obviously. It's my hobby, it's my passion and bigger than I need and I'm not saying you need a big garden like this, but the concepts that I'm talking to you about can be applied to a single bed, and, honestly, if I was just starting out as a gardener, I would start small with a bed or two. Get that under control and then expand it. Depends on how much energy you have, of course. 

This is relatively important here. I think my beds are just about right. They're about the same dimensions as the guys that Ecology Action talk about. About three feet of growing space across the top of the bed. And about five feet, eight, not more than six feet between one center of the path to the next center of the path, and about a foot of slope coming down on the beds. If you get wider than that, you're not going to be able to reach across your bed from one side, and you're going to have a problem. If you want reach more than halfway across your bed, you have a problem because what are you going to do with that stuff that's in the middle. And my paths are about 15 inches wide. That's totally arbitrary. You can make your paths as narrow or as wide as you want. 

But mine are about the width of a steel rake, and I just find that a nice, easy dimension to use. Your paths can be, you can cover your paths with mulch. I use leaf mulch, and I'll show you how that works. But my beds are long. They're about 21 feet long. I'd, again, tell a beginning gardener maybe try something about half of that because if you have a long bed it means you got to walk all the way around it if you want to go to the other side so 10 feet is easier. The advantage of long beds is I got more production in a smaller space so obviously the more path you have, the less growing space you have. There's a 21-foot long bed. There's a 10-foot long bed. Between those two stakes is about three feet. 

That's my maximum growing space, that relatively flat space across the top of the bed. This is the part that if you're just starting out, I want to emphasize, it's very easy. There's no magic to it. You don't have to build anything. It's really laying your paths out, and if you have an existing garden it's obviously super easy because you don't even have any major weed growth to pull out. You just lay out where your paths are going to be, the area that you're going to walk on, and the area in between becomes your bed. And there you can see. I've got my paths here. This is where I walk, and then this is where I don't walk. And those are my beds. 

About three feet of crop across the top. These are 21 feet long beds. And that hard packed space, that's hard clay there. That never gets walked on, I mean it always gets walked on. It's as hard as a dirt road most of the time except when it gets muddy. And that's dense. That's soft. There you can see asparagus. An open bed. Getting ready to plant and cut right out of the sod. 

As we said, find your paths. Weed your paths. Take the extra soil from that weeding, that becomes your first bed. The dirt from your paths goes back into your beds. I compost everything I pull out. I don't worry about if it's this kind of weed or that kind of weed or a good weed or a bad weed. I compost it. I don't worry about it. I stay ahead of my weeding, and I don't even worry about whether my compost gets cooked to the right temperature. It just goes back in. 

But this is very important. More compost you can generate, the better your garden is going to be. You can't argue that fact. You can grow in a pure compost. There's no such thing as an upper limit of how much compost you can see use. You can grow in pure compost and plants will grow extremely well. I treat my plants and everything that I don't harvest and put back into food, I treat it as material for my compost pile. And then this you try to observe as much as possible. Walk on the paths, don't walk on the beds. And you will find over time, as you move your beds will get soft. 

When you first start off your beds may only be about two inches tall. The difference between the path and the bed, maybe not even that. It will just be a little slope. But as the years go by you can keep bringing compost in and shaving the weeds off the path, the beds will get higher. You can see now some of my beds I'll have a foot difference between the path and the top of the bed, and it's just, the soil gets more friable over time, the soil gets more workable, you're rotating different crops through it, and so the beds change. And you can see there's quite a vertical rise here. That's about 10 inches of rise between the path and the top of the bed. I start a lot of my own plants. I do a lot of seed planting. It's not necessary, especially if you're a new gardener and you're worried. 

Seed starting is easy, don't let it scare you, but there's an advantage to starting your own seed, there's two advantages. First of all, there's a huge cost advantage. You can by a whole pack of seeds for three dollars, and they have 50 to a thousand seeds in it. When you buy a single plant, it's three dollars when you buy a plant that's ready to put in the ground. So, obviously, a huge advantage there. The other, and in my opinion even more important advantage, is if you start your own seed you can plant whatever you want. You're not limited to what the market is selling you. If you want some fancy heirloom tomato that only you are growing or it's something really neat, this is really cool and I want to grow it, you can do it with seeds, and you won't always find those plants when you go to the market. Obviously, gardening is all about weeding. There are methods for gardening that you don't have to weed, but I'm not going there. 

But they exist and you can follow that path if you want to, but most gardeners will tell you most of their time is spent weeding. And I do as much as I can to keep my weeds down, and I cover my beds in the fall with leaves and then I rake those leaves back and into the paths in the spring, and those become a weed mulch for most, they eventually break down, but they become a very good weed mulch for, certainly, half of the gardening season. [INAUDIBLE] >> Pardon me? I don't chop them up. I just bring them in. Some people don't have good access to leaves, but almost any kind of a live material, grass clippings can work, straw and hay can work. Straw is ideal if you can afford straw or you have an easy access to straw. That's probably the best of all if you can afford it. This is important. It doesn't happen for nothing. Okay? You can't just plant your seeds at Memorial Day and then go harvest them on Labor Day. 

It isn't huge amount of work, but you have to devote some time to it, and you have to be there on a regular basis to make sure your plants don't dry out. You have to make sure that there isn't some bug or animal that's destroying your plants, and you have to be there to harvest your plants when they start putting out fruit because most plants, the more you harvest, the more fruit you get. A lot of them will keep putting fruit out so you have to have continuous harvest. So you have to put some effort into it. The idea of spacing the crops in these raised beds is very simple. You want these plants when they are mature and fully grown to just be touching each other with their leaves in all directions. So if you're used to planning in a linear row and you grow your plants so they're just close together and the spacing is, let's say, is 12 inches apart this way but they say the rows should be two feet apart or three feet apart, forget that two feet apart, just keep everything about 12 inches in all directions to cover your three foot space. And you have to learn this. It will take some practice. There are books like that book I showed you, and there's a lot of stuff online that will tell you what this ideal spacing is, but you'll have to learn that. 

And you can't cheat on that. You can't say if it says six inches apart I'm going to plant them five inches apart or four inches apart so I can get more in there because the plants don't like it. They can't be overcrowded. If they're overcrowded, you'll have two problems. Your plants will get spindly and leggy. They won't be getting enough sunshine. They won't be getting enough air in between. And another thing is the insects will get more to them. They have to be healthy, and when they're tight and they're packed in, they're just not healthy. So that's very important. 

Overcrowding will diminish your yield. So you got to find your ideal yield or your ideal space. You don't want to waste any space but you don't want to be any tighter than would be good for the plant. Here, again, I showed you this picture before. There's peppers that are going to bloom. There's horseradish. I don't know what's behind there, but just filling up those things, just filling up the bed with a green canopy. There you can see I'm doing it with corn. Corn, as it grows, it's shading out any weeds below. There's garlic planted with other stuff shading out things below. 

And now I'm going to talk about some specific crops and how I grow and few things, and it will give you a lot of ideas about how the system works. I grow sweet potatoes and a lot of people say you don't grow sweet potatoes in Wisconsin. Actually, Wisconsin is a good state for sweet potatoes. It actually has a sweet potato industry. You see what I'm doing? I'm growing them under a black plastic mulch. I'm not a fan of polyethylene. I know that's it an oil product and everything like that. I bought a 500-foot roll at Menards years ago; I haven't used it up yet, and I get about three seasons out of it. They are now coming out with biodegradable mulches, and if I were starting over again, I would certainly look at those. The only problem with all new technology, when it's first out there it's very expensive. 

So these biodegradable mulches are very expensive, but they do work and if you're really into the ecological sustainable thing, that is certainly the direction I would look at. But a black mulch does two things to the sweet potatoes. One is a weed suppressant when you first start out. And you can see the sweet potatoes are 18 inches apart here. Kind of spread out. Also, that black is the solar collector. So it soaks up the sun. So the sweet potatoes think they're in Louisiana. They don't think they're in Wisconsin anymore, and it makes a huge, huge difference because sweet potatoes like it hot. They're a South American plant, and the hotter the better. 

There's almost no upper end on the heat they can tolerate. I start mine in jars like you see here. I start them around the January. After a while they'll start to put out that beautiful sweet potato leaf. When they get about two and a half inches tall, I just take a single-edged razor blade, slice it right off perpendicular to the plant. I repot those little cuttings into soft potting soil, deep potting soil. It's got to be at least a foot deep. Let them grow until May, keep them well watered, and Memorial Day I stick them in the ground. And there they are under that black plastic. And the reason they're under that white cover is of all the plants that I grow in my garden, deer like sweet potato leaves the best. 

They like them better than anything. They like sweet potatoes. And sweet potato leaves are edible. Down south they didn't like collards and other greens. So I found that that discourages the deer. Sweet potatoes are morning glories. They're related to morning glories. They put out a very beautiful morning glory looking flower. And that's what my bed looks like after it matures. You can see it's totally covered with vine. 

And these are long, long, long, long vines. And when I'm ready to harvest, which is just before the first frost because sweet potatoes will not tolerate frost at all, they will just shrivel up when the frost comes, I take my loppers, my garden loppers, and cut them all off. There's my vine in the cart there that I'm going to carry over to the compost pile. Pull back the plastic and dig out my sweet potatoes. And I'll get about 80 pounds of sweet potatoes out of one of these beds. And sweet potatoes are good for a couple reasons. They're one of the healthiest, remember George Washington Carver, the healthiest thing you can grow is sweet potatoes and peanuts. So anyway, they're very healthy. The other good thing about them is they're the longest lasting crop for storage that you can grow. They'll last a year. 

They will last a year in a normal basement. You don't need a cold cellar. You don't need any refrigeration. All we do is we dry these out. Clean them up, dry them out for a couple weeks, and then we wrap the big tubers up in newspaper. We use the little stringy ones up first, but the big ones that we want to keep, we wrap them up and just crumple them up in newspaper, and keep them down in the basement. Sixty degrees and a year later we can pull a sweet potato out and eat it. So that's what's nice about sweet potatoes. And they are good. I grow a lot of strawberries. 

I do a three-year rotation on strawberries. You can't grow strawberries in the same spot year after year. After a while the yields will diminish. The berries will get so small they'll start to look like wild strawberries again. So you have to keep replenishing your plants, and I just move them from bed to bed. They're a hard thing to keep the weeds out of there. You can see I got a lot of grass and chickweed in my strawberries, so I spend a little bit of time weeding there. But the strawberries that you grow yourself are not the same as the strawberries you buy in the store. There's no comparison. Strawberries you buy in a store are made out of Styrofoam. 

[LAUGHTER] The strawberries that you grow yourself are delicious, delicious, delicious. There is just no comparison. I grow a lot of garlic. My wife is an excellent cook. You can't be a good cook without using garlic.  And this is a method my son taught me. My son was actually a professional horticulturalist for quite a while, and he learned this method of growing garlic in rows at the peaks of these raised beds. See what I have? I have three peaks or two valleys that I just take my raised bed and made these trenches with. I plant my garlic six inches apart, and I just push the cloves into the top of the soft soil there. I do my own. 

I save my own garlic from year to year. I'm growing hardneck garlic now. There's two types of garlic. There's what's called hardneck and what's called softneck. Mostly what you see in the store is softneck. The reason they have it in the stores is it lasts longer than the hardneck. It actually stores longer, but it doesn't taste as good. It's good but it's not as good. The hardneck garlic is the one with all the different spicy flavors and more varieties. So we're growing hardneck varieties now. 

And I put them six inches apart. I don't need those markers to do that, but I just did that for a kick one time to know where my six inches were. Then, and this is done in October, if you wanted to grow garlic this year, you can. You can start some garlic in April, but it won't be as big, it won't be as good as if you start your garlic the October before. And I cover it with straw. The whole bed. And then very first thing in the spring, you can see the snow is not even melted here, the garlic is starting to work its way through the straw. And then I'll pull that straw back so the sun can get in there and heat it up. And there you can see. And then what I will do, and I'll talk about this later, is I will plant other crops in between those rows and around and on the sides, greens and lettuces and things like that so I get more production out of the same bed. 

Garlic gets ready about July. Around the middle of July it's usually ready. You got to dry it out for a little while, and we clean it up, wash it, chop it off at about six inches, and again we store it in the basement. And the hardneck, as I said, doesn't last quite as long as the softneck, but you can get up to about six months, and then it will start to get dry and flaky. I talked about interplanting. Here I have garlic interplanted with lettuces and greens and Asian greens. And that helps keep the greens from bolting, going to seed. And obviously you get more production out of one bed than you would if you just grew a single crop. Here's peas that I'm growing and I've got lettuces in and around the peas. I do a lot of trellising. 

I showed you that slide before growing squashes and melons up vertically. I grow a lot of different squashes. Some of the squashes, the real big ones I don't trellis. You can trellis huge squashes. You have to make cradles for them, but it's just a little too much work. You just let those run. But the smaller squashes like these, oops, I'm sorry, I will trellis. Big squashes, like Hubbards, those can get huge. I don't know if you know but Hubbard squashes and squash, hard squash, by the way, is another crop that will last almost a year. You can get six months easy out of a good squash. 

I interplant corn and cucumbers, and here's a negative to this raised bed system that I use: if you've grown corn before, you know that corn has a tendency, when a wind comes along, to fall over and blow over. Well, it's even more likely to do it in these raised beds because you've got this super soft soil and you've got it sticking up high. I've had many experiences where a thunderstorm comes through and my corn is laying over. It doesn't stand itself back up. You've got to physically go out there and stand it back up. So I actually now have decided that I'm going to prevent that from happening, and I made these little corn corrals using T posts, running some jute through so no matter what kind of a wind storm comes through, that corn's going to be there. It's not going to fall over. And then I'll plant cucumbers all around the edges, and they'll work their way through, and the cucumbers seem to do very well mixed in with the corn. I grow a lot of beans. And my pole greens I grow up these tripod things. 

You can see there's a couple guys here selling those things. They're really good growing beans up for the pole beans. I find them ideal for that. And there you can see my pole beans just climbing up those tripods and then my bush beans down below. Tomatoes, I've found that with tomatoes I can get a huge amount of tomato crop out of this. I'll grow about 30 plants in one of these beds. About 18 to 20 inches apart. You have to be careful with tomatoes, though. They got to get a lot of air circulation. I think you remember if you're a gardener, a couple years ago we had a bad situation here with what was called blight, and it wiped out most people's tomatoes. 

It got me for about 75% of my tomatoes, which is heart-breaking, but I learned from an old gardener out in New Ulm, Minnesota, that the more air space you can get between your tomatoes, the less likely you are to have issues with blight and rot and any of those things. So what I've started doing is sloping my tomatoes, one center, one sloping this way, one sloping this way, and then I try to get it, I've taken these T posts and just run wooden structure across the top and try to force everything up. I keep the bottom clean. Any tomatoes or vine that wants to lay on the ground, I snip them away, I prune them away. You can prune the heck out of tomatoes. You can prune those like a fruit tree. They'll tolerate a lot of pruning. So I keep it clean. I tried mulching tomatoes one year. In my opinion, it was a huge mistake. 

The slugs got into the tomatoes and used that mulch, and then all my tomatoes were scarred  with slug tracks. If you don't know what a slug is, it's a snail without a shell. So they're very prevalent in Wisconsin and they like wet. They just love wet areas. So there you can see my tomatoes growing up. Getting them up as high as I can. The nice thing about growing your own tomatoes is you can grow tomatoes you won't find in the store. The big thing these days is what are called heirlooms. Heirlooms are really nothing more than what are called open pollinated seeds versus a hybrid seed. And usually they've been around for a hundred years or longer. 

Although, they're still produced and they're still new varieties coming all the time. So the best tomato sandwiches, of course, use these old German golds and brandy wines and tomatoes that you just do not find in the store. We dry a lot of tomatoes. We preserve a lot of food. This is an excellent system, I've found, for growing peas. You can see that I've got three feet between the poles, and then this is that two-foot fencing, that green plasticized fencing, you find it at Menards and Farm and Fleet and things like that. And I just use some jute twine to ring it up. I put my peas two inches apart down at the bottom on either side of the fence. And the nice thing about this system is as the peas climb, it puts the peas when it's time to harvest right where I want to pick them. They're right out there in front of me. 

Peas can be hard to harvest. If any of you have grown them, you know that. You can't let them fall over. You really lose the yield. So this gets them right up where I want to harvest them. And I do want to talk just a second about a very unique variety of pea and that's this purple pea here. It's called Capucijner. It's a soup pea. It's not a green pea that you eat right now. It's a pea that you let dry in the shell, and then you use it as a soup pea, and it's the most delicious pea. 

Everybody in Holland knows this pea, and it's a Dutch pea. I bought it from Johnny's years ago. And I save the seed year after year after year. Peas are super easy to save if you're into saving seeds. And I don't see it in the catalogs anymore, but if you want to find some, I would suggest you look it up. It's called Capucijner, like the monks, because when you open the pea up it looks a little bit like a monk's hood. You don't have to trellis asparagus. I just put the posts around it because when I'm working with my asparagus it wants to fall over, and so I just rope it off so it doesn't fall in my way. I grow a lot of onions and leeks. There you can see a full bed of onions. 

And there's leeks in half a bed and onions in the other half a bed. And, again, if you want to be a good cook, you got to have leeks because they're the hot thing. The French have known it forever. >> I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. How far apart do you space yours? We've tried to do intensive gardening and our onions were small. >> They have to be four and a half to five inches apart for a good bulb. And leeks should be five and a half to six inches apart. If your onions are getting too close together, they won't put out a good size bulb. I actually rotate rhubarb. A lot of people say, why rotate rhubarb? You can leave it there for 60 years, and it just keeps coming up. 

I find that by rotating it on a four year rotation through these beds, I do a half of bed of rhubarb and a half of bed of raspberries, that I actually get more production and bigger, fatter stalks by moving it through the garden rather than leaving it in one space year after year. So that's why I do it. I grow a lot of potatoes, and, again, potatoes is a crop people say, why do you grow potatoes in Wisconsin? You can grow all the potatoes you could possibly want for Wisconsin, but I can grow exactly what I want. And I like potatoes. I use it, it's my deep digging method of getting to the deep tilling because I'm not into deep tilling anymore of moving the soil around. About six or seven years these beds get totally moved through. And you can grow whatever potato you want. And there's a lot of potatoes you'll never see in the the stores. You will find them at the farmers market, especially the farmers market here in Madison. And this is a little thing I do. 

I actually buy my seed potato from an organic farmer in Madison. People will say, well, you got to buy certified seed potato. The guy said, look, you'll get a year out of it. You can't let it run off because after a while the potatoes will start to pick up scabs and diseases, but I can buy seed potato from him for $2 to $3 a pound; whereas if you go to the catalog and buy organic seed potato, they're $10 to $15 a pound, and I'll take my chances. I haven't had any issues. I'm not telling you have to do that, but I haven't had any issues, and I've been doing it for years and years and years and years. I buy it from him before they shut the market down on Mifflin Street there, and he has a huge assortment of potatoes. There's a couple of guys there that have a huge assortment of potatoes. So I can do the blue potatoes and the little fingerlings and these fancy potatoes that you just can't grow elsewhere. So I grow a lot of different crops. 

And here's a very interesting thing. Here I am, I said never walk on my bed, well I'm up on my bed planting peas. You can see me going across. I got my yardstick out there and all my different pea types, got them labeled and I'm just moving from front to back. If you've ever seen guys work cement, they'll get up on top of the concrete and they'll be standing on a big piece of plywood but they won't sink down in the cement. Same principle exactly. You get on a board and the board floats over this whole bed so I'm not compressing my soil, and I can get up there and work, and I actually used another board that I'll use, and I have a little garden pad here, any garden pad will work, but then I can kneel on my beds without getting my knee prints into the sides of these beds. And so I just drag these things around when, I only use the big one when I'm planting, but this I'll use all the time when I'm, whoops, come on back, when I'm weeding back here. That's a great little kneeler for kneeling against the sides of these beds without destroying the beds. If you're familiar with the British gardeners from England, you know that they're into double digging, and that means deeply digging your soil completely out and moving it from one spot in your garden to the next. 

That kind of practice is falling out of favor for a lot of reasons. People say that the smart practice today in soil is disturb your soil as little as possible. And you'll say, even the big boys, even the guys that are growing huge acreage, they're doing these no till methods. They're not doing the deep chisel plow tilling of gardening. They're finding now that the best thing to do with the garden is let the earthworms do the work for you. Let the microbes do the work for you. The more structure you have in your soil without destroying, that's why rototillers, people can make an argument against rototillers because they're churning that soil up, where this method does very little soil damage. The only time my soil really gets deeply dug is when I'm digging out my potatoes and my sweet potatoes. So there you can see it really gets churned up there, but otherwise all I do is, I'll go back to artichokes in a second, otherwise all I do is just bring my soil up. I use a tool called a broadfork to get some air in down there once a year and then just shallowly work in the compost. 

You can grow artichokes in Wisconsin. I know it's a California crop. I've grown them a couple times. I'm not going to recommend it. It takes a lot of space. It takes a lot of time. But you can grow whatever you want and that's another advantage of being your own gardener, of course. If you want to try something, artichokes are good. This is a book I highly recommend. You'll see it all around. 

Almost every store carries it around here in Wisconsin. You can find used copies of it every. Jerry -- is an organic gardener. He's pretty famous. He writes for the newspapers around Madison, and he's been around for a long, long time. I use it because it's my guide for when you should stick your plants in the ground, when you should start your seeds, and it's specifically tailored to southern Wisconsin garden, actually to Madison gardening. So it's a very good guide book to use. I've been gardening all my life, but this is my reference. I go to it constantly. So you can see that I can grow all of these different vegetables in this garden, and, as I said, if you want to start small you can cut it down to just grow what you want. 

I grow all kinds of different cabbages. I grow carrots, strawberries, raspberries, bean, sweet potatoes Jerusalem artichokes. It doesn't matter. You can grow it. The benefits of this system are your soil never gets compacted, unlike when you're walking in rows where your soil gets very hardly compacted. It's an easy crop rotation which is spelled out on the back of that handout. Everything that I don't eat goes back into the garden. Everything that I don't eat goes back into the garden. It becomes part of the compost. I don't need to bring in fertilizer. 

I use very little sprays. I'm playing around with this spray called neem oil, but normally I don't use any sprays at all on my insects. Weeding actually becomes less of a chore as the plants get more mature. And it is as close as you can hope for in a closed loop system which is what sustainability is all about. So here you can see I'm using a lot of T posts. I use a lot of hand tools. This is a broadfork. This broadfork was made by a guy that used to live in Black Earth named Larry cooper. He now lives down in Kentucky. This is a great tool if you're going to get into raised bed gardens. 

What you do is you just work it in and it breaks the soil. It gets air down deep in your soil without turning your soil over. It originally came out of Bavaria Switzerland about 200 years ago. There's a lot of broadforks on the market, but in my opinion Larry Cooper's gulland broadfork, it's sold by Earth Tools down in Kentucky, is the best. I still use this old tool, if you remember this one that grandma had. I use it for breaking up my top soil. I use a lot of different forks. I designed a couple tools that I really like that I use mainly as weeding tools. And, of course, you do need some input. You can't garden without any input, but buckets, hoses, and all the other stuff that gardeners need. 

That's called a T post puller, that red thing there. So if you want to work with T posts, you can make your structures out of anything you want, but if you want to work with T posts, you definitely going to need one of those things. They'll sell them at farm and fleet and places like that, and then you'll need a T post and the pounders. There's T posts for my peas. T posts, the nice thing about working with these T posts is when the frosts do come, it makes a very easy system for wrapping up your stuff to get your stuff protected from the frost. And leaves, and this is just about the end of my talk. I bring all the leaves I can into my garden in the fall. Totally cover it with leaves. This year we didn't see this very much. I don't know if we will. 

It's not over yet, but we haven't seen much snow. But snow is a good thing, but as soon as the snow starts to go away, I can rake back the leaves. They become mulch in the soil, and I can get into my garden earlier than anybody can in a row type garden. I use a lot of compost. Bring it out of the house. I put it into a 55-gallon drum that's got holes in the bottom. Dump it out. It's full of worms. I mix this whole thing into my dry compost. And so compost becomes totally integral. 

I also make, what can I say, a pile of just weeds in my garden so I don't have to run to the compost pile. And, of course, you know this as gardeners, you have to protect your crops. [LAUGHTER] This was a tomatillo, but mama woodchuck got it. So you have to worry about that. And I've found that this agricultural fabric is ideal. They sell this now, everybody is starting to sell this. It used to be just the growers used to have access to it. Now every gardener has access to it. It lets light through. It lets rain through. 

Keeps bugs out. Keeps animals out. Warms up your crops a little bit so you can actually use it like a hoop house. There's a little hoop house that my son told me how to design. Just laying some PVC over some rebar and you can knock out a hoop house or a little miniature greenhouse in an afternoon with that method. Got to protect your animals. If you have an dog you won't have a worry about a deer. It's that simple. If you can let a dog run around your yard, you don't have any deer issues. Otherwise, you've got to protect them from deer. 

Japanese beetles, all kinds of bugs, you got to learn how to live with the bugs. But you got to remember, this little trap I designed, Japanese beetles are stupid, if you get out there in the morning or late at night when they're slow you can just knock them into this funnel and they meet their doom. But most insects are either good or of no problem. The entomologists would tell you that 97% of the insects in your yard are either good for you or they're doing no damage. There's only 3% of the bad guys, so why would you want to kill 97% of the good guys to get to 3%? So there you go. I grow a lot of plants that bring in bees and beneficial insects. I strongly recommend if you want to get to be a really good gardener, you get to know this guy. He's a garden guru out of Maine named Elliot Coleman. I follow his practices a lot. I use his rotation which I talked about. 

I try to keep it down in a book, know where I am going from year to year. I tried using it on a computer, but I found it's easier to use a pencil and paper. But it's kind of like herding cats. [LAUGHTER] What goes where. So you have to take your chances. But it works. And I don't know why that came out in Chinese. That was supposed to be our logo, CobraHead. But that's the end of my talk, so I've got a couple minutes left for questions. So if anybody has questions, I'd be happy to entertain. 

Yes? >> I have a two-foot bed that runs alongside a garage. Is that too narrow so heap up and use as a raised bed? >> No, not at all. Not at all. That will work for you. The only thing is three-foot is better because you can get more crop space in it. But whatever works. And I would certainly not destroy it. Sir? >> You keep talking about putting everything you don't eat back into the garden as compost, like I'm thinking the outer leaves off of cabbage or the outer leaves off of cauliflower, stuff like that. Do you throw it back into the soil green or do you have to put it in the compost pile first? >> I sometimes let it lay in the paths green, but then I put it in the compost pile. I try to run everything through a compost system. 

I don't even care if it's burdock and thistle and nasty stuff. If it's come out, it's going back in. >> Do you ever, like winter, some of the root crops over, like, carrots, just leave them in the ground, dig them out when you want to? >> Parsnips especially. Parsnips are wonderful if you can harvest them in April. I've done it with carrots, and they were good. You got to cover them, though, with straw or something because otherwise they will freeze and you'll destroy the structure. But, yeah, I do that a lot. >> When you do the sweet potatoes, are you buying the potato out of the store and then putting it in the jar? >> Both. The question is, when you do sweet potatoes, do you buy sweet potatoes? I usually will take a couple of my best sweet potatoes from the previous year and use those to start, but if for some reason I don't have any good ones, I will go to the store. I go to Willy Street or Whole Foods or a place that's selling organic because you just cannot trust the nonorganic mainstream potatoes that they may not have a growth suppressant in it which won't allow them to sprout nicely. 

>> If you have an area in your yard, we've got an area that's got a lot of creeping Charlie in it, how would you go about starting to use an area like that for the raised bed? >> I would try to do a total weeding. I'd get in there with a garden fork and a good weed puller and just loosen everything up, and get as much weeds out as you can. Creeping Charlie and any weed can be controlled if you constantly cut it back. Even if you don't get the whole root out, if you chop it off now and it starts to put some sprout out, chop it off again and starts to put, eventually it will give up. It's got to have that green to stay alive. So if you can keep chopping it off, eventually it will die. But I would dig out as much as I could at the start. >> Would you bring soil in then? >> Pardon me? >> Would you bring soil in to get started? >> I might bring soil in. Another problem with starting fresh, especially if you're cutting in sod, you'll have a problem with wire worms and you'll have a problem with Japanese beetle grow ups. They exist in sod. 

They love it in the sod. So I would think about trying to, yeah, bring in, maybe. Or just have at it and fight it for a year. >> Does it matter how you align your beds? North, south, east, or west? >> I don't think so. Mine are aligned on a north/south alignment, but I'm not sure. I don't think it really matters. I think it's whatever works for you. I'd prefer, I think, a north/south over an east/west. >> Do you ever get any erosion along the sides of your bed? >> Yes I do. And that's a question I probably should have brought up. 

The question is, do you get erosion? These beds sometimes will have a tendency to wash out a little bit or gully, especially if you get in one of our crazy thunderstorms. I don't worry about it. I just rake it back up. Usually once they put some root down it isn't a problem. I've never had it to be a major, major problem. But, yeah, you will get some erosion, some gulling off the sides of the beds. Ma'am? >> Artichokes, what variety to you grow and when do you start the seeds? >> I don't even remember. You start them in the spring indoors, and I know Johnny's is now touting an artichoke that you can get a harvest the first season. The two times I grew it, I had to cover them with straw and I harvested the second year. But now they're saying they've got an 85-day artichoke. 

But they take so much room that I said the heck with it. Okay, I guess we're probably getting close. >> You can take another one. >> Okay, another question? >> Do you have a website? >> Yes we do. We are CobraHead. com. I actually have a garden blog. I talk constantly about my garden. I try to get a post up there every couple of weeks about my garden. I always have a recipe. 

My wife is an excellent cook so we have recipes of what we're pulling out of the garden and what we're cooking. And I've got a booth here. We're 311 so come by and talk to me. I'd be happy if you sent me an email. I love gardening and I think that's where it's at so I'd be happy to answer any questions. And one last question, the gentleman in the back there. >> Can you tell me a little about you raspberries in the raised bed. >> Yeah, okay. I treat raspberries as a moveable crop in my thing. Raspberries are very easy to grow. 

I have what's called an everbearing variety. I got them from a neighbor so I have no idea what the specific is. I put a lot of compost into them. Raspberries like to run and they'll send runners out everywhere and they'll get in your way. If anything gets outside the bed, I'll kill it. I chop it off. It's a weed once it's outside of its parameter. In February or March, I'll cut the raspberries, I'll pull out totally any old cane, but the new canes I'll cut down to about that high. Some people cut them right off at ground level, but I cut them off at two feet. And then just let them go. 

About every four years I move them to another bed. And I get great raspberry production. Excellent raspberry production. Okay, I guess that's it, folks, so I thank you very, very much. [APPLAUSE]