Garden Types

When researching how to grow low energy input food online - 100s of sites came up! Growing food crops in pots, square foot gardening, spin farming and weed-less water-less gardening all came to my attention.

Mel Bartholomew s Square Foot Garden and Spin farming

Weed-Less Water-less gardens consists of putting down layers of layers on top of layers of whatever you have from the lawn, garden or compost. . . and letting it compost where its at. To build the pile to 8" or more is ideal. Then let the earth worms do all the mixing (and they will). As you get a good pile going, weeds aren't a problem to put out since the ground is so soft. I found its best to make a pile in the fall so it settles a bit by spring planting. I've found that holding off planting the weedless waterless gardens is best to wait until after all weeds have sprouted so a quick rake or hoe over the area cleans them up before planting.

A helpful website to keep from growing the same crops in the same spot, year after year and to collect data on seed lists and amounts, I use: GrowVeg.com it's free for 30 days and it has a reasonable yr-yr fee.

Permaculturing the woods seems to be the solution to Zero Energy Farming since we plant once and harvest forever (in theory) with only minimal maintenance.

We have some natural permaculture going on and some we plan to add for wild life and our goal this year is to add natural plants for energy production as we get into farm-based ethanol production.

Mushroom production technology is no longer a highly prized secret so we do several types of spore innoculating types of mushrooms.

Orchards are also a great low-energy food source. There is so much written about them I won't get into that now.

And finally, the crown jewel of food production - off-the-grid water gardening for food production. But there is no other way to get fresh water chestnuts or a few other goodies.