On Friday, March 1, 2019 at 11:58:30 PM UTC-5, Muggles wrote:
On 2/28/2019 5:02 PM, T wrote:
On 2/28/19 2:27 PM, Muggles wrote:
French Intensive method.
What is that?
It's an organic gardening method where you amend the top 10" +/- of the
place you want to plant with a truckload of cow manure mixed in with the
top soil, and then space everything half the normal distance you
normally would plant them.
For example, we had a raised bed about 4' deep and 6' long that went the
length of one section of our back yard fence.Â* We dug the dirt loose
about 10 inches deep, then tilled in a truck load of composted cow
manure. Next, I put heavy duty black plastic on top of the dirt and
secured it with gardening U-wires in the ground, poked holes in the
plastic and planted a dozen cabbage plants half the distance apart that
you'd normally plant those seedlings. We did that with broccoli,
cauliflower and cabbage in 3 separate beds. Once everything was planted
like that we spread pine bark mulch in between each seedling about 3
inches thick and made sure we poked drain holes in the plastic in
between the seedlings.
We grew cabbages so big they were hard to carry and ran out of people to
give them away, too.Â* The cauliflower and broccoli produced so much more
than we could ever use and didn't quit producing until it got hot in
early summer. Best garden result ever!
NO weeding - Rarely had to water because when it rained the water didn't
evaporate because of the black plastic and mulch on top of it. PLUS,
cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli are heavy feeders and had no problem
getting everything they needed to produce a larger than normal harvest
in half the space.Â* 
--
Maggie
My wife uses the black plastic garden cloth method on some of her rows, cutting holes every so often to put the plants and leaving the plastic intact elsewhere to prevent weeds. One year, I decided to try that in the pumpkin patch and they all died early! I realized later that pumpkin vines put down roots every so often to get water for the far ends of the spread-out plants; when the roots on the extremities tried to get into the soil, they were stopped by the plastic.
Paul