Vegetable Garden

A vegetable garden here means annual crops - the ones sown, harvested and pulled up within a year - grown in a fenced plot divided into separate beds. Each bed takes a different group of plants each cycle, and the groups are plant families rather than single crops, because the diseases living in soil attack a whole family at once. Fencing is not a refinement: its height and how deeply the wire is buried decide whether the harvest reaches the kitchen or the deer and rabbits.

Rotation is the garden's main defence, and why the beds are planned on paper before anything is sown. A short rotation leaves host material standing almost all the time, so soil-borne fungi build up; a longer one breaks the cycle, and cover crops such as mustard suppress them further. How long is long enough depends on the disease rather than on one rule. Where a flock is let into the beds, what it leaves is raw manure, which must go on at least 120 days before harvesting anything that touches the soil, or 90 days before a crop held clear of it. Poultry droppings carry more risk than other manures and are hot enough with nitrogen to burn a seedling set straight in behind the birds.

So the birds work beds going into fallow or a long-season crop, never one about to be sown for salad. Composting the manure first removes the waiting period, but only real composting does: the heap has to hold about 45 to 60 degrees C (113 to 140 F) for several weeks with turning. Manure merely left to age does not do it. Three things the garden cannot run without: water, the sectioned fence, and somewhere to compost. Write down which bed the birds were on and when, since an interval counted in months is only enforceable if the date exists. The slow failure is returning one family to its favourite bed year after year: it looks fine for two seasons, then something establishes in that soil and does not leave.