If you’ve never heard of a paddock garden chances are you’re from the city. They’re not often found among high-rises and overpasses but if you do head out into the countryside for your weekend drives or have a bach that requires your winding through farmland to get to, you might have seen one.
I shouldn’t pretend that I’m intimately familiar with them though because I’m not, having heard of them for the first time this spring. A couple buying seed from our Riverton shop asked for bulk carrot seed and when I asked politely why they were so keen on carrots, they explained that they were going to feed those, along with cabbage, lettuce and beetroot seeds into their ridger (a ridger is a clever Southland invention that disks and rolls soil into a ridge, drops the seeds in and sprinkles on fertilizer, all in one smooth, pragmatic action) and sow out a section of a paddock chosen to be ‘rested’ for a year.
The couple seemed surprised (a) that I didn’t know all about it and (b) that I’d find it interesting, so ordinary was it in their rural experience, but I did.
The practical approach to growing the bulk of your year’s vegetables in one swoop seemed to me to be so reasonable and so Southland, that it deserves to be more widely reported. The beauty of the method is the sheer volume of vegetables that can be grown with seeming little effort. My rural couple even mix the various seeds together and sow en masse – how pragmatic is that! The success of the technique comes in part from sowing into soil that’s well manured by stock and not previously exhausted by crops that humans like to eat, having been in grass previously. This means also that the garden will be relatively weed-free due to its isolation from ordinary gardens where weeds like to gather and build their numbers.
I’m going to visit their on-farm garden in the summer and see for myself how it’s done.
The danger with the paddock garden, it seems to me, will be the other ‘crops’ on the farm – the grazing beasties, that might decide that the succulent vegetables growing where they once browsed are for them, and help themselves to the bounty.
I’m guessing paddock gardens come fitted with a fence!
6 comments:
So does the ridger cut, roll and sow into pasture, or have they taken the grass layer off first? I've been around a few Southland farmers and farms and never heard of this, but it's very intriguing. They obviously don't have too many rabbits though ;-)
wildcrafty - I avoided saying this in my post but they Roundup the pasture first. As I'm an organic grower, I was appalled to learn this but didn't want to dismiss paddock gardens out of hand. You woul be interested in the process my son Adam is working ion at the moment - a machine/tool that drills into mown pasture and operates like a can opener, slicing with a disk, pulling a shoe through the cut soil and delivering seeds evenly into the resulting cultivation. It's very cool and operated by one person, barefoot if prefered. You could, were you a 'green guerilla' sort, sow an entire rugby field over night with a surprising range of seeds :-) I'll post a photo sometime.
Back to the paddock garden ...I guess you could graze hard, cultivate with a rotary hoe then ridge but probably any method of prepatration would do as would any method of sowing. This was just their way. I do know that Bob Crowder ex- Biological Husbandry unit at Lincoln is/was using a similar 'paddock' method for producing vegetables. It's appealing in many ways. We (Adam especially) are working hard on ways to quickly convert field to productive vegetable/grain production.
Roundup is a relatively new approach. In the good old days the paddock was ploughed in early winter and the frost broke the soil down
A fair depth of well-worked soil is needed to ridge
Roundup allows grass to be grown in the early spring when you are looking for every bit of feed, of course less fossil oil is needed to get the crop in and less nitrogen as well.
A win, win I would have thought
Like all real farming a balancing act
The garden crops are mainly those that have a long growing season although a row of potatoes at the edge is not unknown .The principal of out of sight ,out of mind seems to rule
Interestingly I saw what seemed to be this type of garden scattered about in the fields in Europe this last year
RayF
That's interesting Ray and I do take your point about Roundup, despite my dislike for it which comes from my interest in wetlands and other sensitive watery environments and the critters that live therein.
I think paddock gardening has a lot to recommend it - I didn't mention spuds because I was building a picture of the ridger-does-all but I know these are a mainstay.
I've read a bit about gardening in rural Europe and would like to see it for myself, along with the foraging wild fields full of mushrooms, berries, nuts etc that I hear about and wonder if it's just fanciful thinking.
One of the best times we had in France, was walking (with my son's in-laws)along the trails used by cross country skiers, picking fungi that I know as "Ink cap" but they had a nice french name for. It has to be eaten quickly before it changes into black ink, quite nice though
We had a special knife, a Opinel No 8, well they have now as I bought it for them, that has a brush to get the perfect mushroom
RayF
goutte d'encre?
Your description is just the kind of thing I'm meaning Ray.
I eat those btw, picked fresh here in Riverton - very nice too.
I have an Opinel as well, by chance, given to me by a travelling Frenchman. I don't remember which no. it is but it has no brush.
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