from HCFS and Grow Food Well
There are many ways of gardening and many excellent sources of advice, but we have a unique opportunity to provide some great information from our Board President, Tom Bartel’s GrowFoodWell.com video-based backyard garden training website. Tom’s biointensive approach makes excellent use of resources (including your time), can be very productive in harsh growing situations, and it works—just look at these harvests obtained in our dry short-season climate in Southwest Colorado.
Tom focuses on backyard gardens, which should be everywhere, but the methods can be adapted readily to all sorts of garden settings:
- School Gardens and other educational gardens need to be suited to the size, safety, and educational considerations of their target audience, with age-appropriate signage and shaded areas with benches for both groups and individuals.
- Preschool Gardens, for our youngest children, need particular attention to height and width of beds, extra safety concerns (for those who put everything in their mouths), and opportunities for Sensory Garden features.
- Community Gardens have special needs depending on whether they feature individual or communal beds.
- Institutional Gardens have the greatest impact if they are highly visible to workers and the public with signage that ideally relates the food grown to the institution’s mission and to any café, cafeteria, or restaurant at the site.
- Wild Gardens—In all gardens, we strongly recommend benches, hideaways, and paths for quiet observation of nature at work in the garden. Our Wild School Gardens ideas—including monitoring and Citizen Science—can be adapted for any garden and for all ages.
Go to Tom’s HCFS Garden Resources Page for videos, PDFs, & more, including:
- How to build a 4×8 foot raised bed with parts list, prices, & pdf and video instructions
- Planting calendar, freeze dates, annual bed prep, compost
- Setting up a fully automated drip system
- Pests and Living Soil
- And much more
