Making Raised Beds on a Farm Scale

I don't live on a mountainside, but my town isn't called one of the "Hilltowns" for nothing, and Sepp Holzer's permaculture designs, set in a cold, steep place with stripped soil (my soil was literally stripped when the farm was a sod farm in the 1980s) comes closer to what my farm requires than almost anything else. I'm particularly taken by his methods of making large scale raised beds from brush.

He has a recent book on his techniques, and it is extremely valuable, even for a woman who doesn't have his same passion for earth moving equipment ;-). Neat stuff - a way of making land that is harder to use farmable for a more diverse range of crops.

Sharon

More like this

Kate at "Living the Frugal Life" has a great post on the merits and techniques of sheet mulching in the garden. Since this has been the key to soil improvement (and we have dreadful soil) in our garden, I wanted to highlight it. Significant soil improvement is one of them. This isn't exactly…
The first thing you need to know about my farm is that it is huge. I mean enormous - by world standards. The vast majority of the world's farms - more than 80%, are very small farms, of less than 2 hectares (about 5 acres), and they produce the majority of the world's staple crops and calories. I…
In some ways, we may be fortunate that the house we chose falls in a middle place in time - old enough to have character and beauty and a kind of solidity, new enough that we don't feel compelled to restore it to a past moment in time. Nor do I worry too much about the scratches the kids put in the…
My friend Alice hosted an urban permaculture class at her house a few years ago. She lives in an brownstone in a downtown neighborhood of Albany with her husband and two young kids, and the occasional housemate. Two permaculture design teachers and a host of enthusiastic students came together to…

Very interesting video, but not much there on what I think of as raised beds. My situation is pretty much the opposite of his... deep, flat, low-elevation, Delta farmland. But still the idea of raised beds on a commercial scale has a certain appeal, mainly for weed control and drainage. Do you know if he has more to say about raised beds somewhere else?

By Hal Fiore (not verified) on 17 Oct 2011 #permalink