Triple-Digging in Denmark
A Danish farmer has written to share extraordinary results from triple-dug beds.
You might think triple-digging would leave him exhausted, but his report is very enthusiastic!
Greetings from Denmark . . .
Back in 1981 I received the great book, The Self-sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour. At the time, I was a young man at farming school. After reading the book I realized that I had started farming school for the wrong reasons, or rather, I had let the ideas of “the
bigger the better” overtake my original reasons for beginning the program. My ideas were not about big machines and oversized livestock.
So I dropped out and found other things to do with my life. But always I had the philosophy of small scaled, natural farming/growing in the back of my mind, and John Seymour’s book became my “bible.”
In 1997 I bought a small farm with my wife at the time and engaged in a longstanding passion for wine growing—a bit of a challenge in a cool climate country like Denmark. Additional challenges came after I discovered that my wife and I didn’t share the same interest in ecology and self-sufficiency. As a result I had to sell the farm when we divorced. Wives may change, but ideas don’t, if they are strong enough.I now have a new wife who shares my commitments and we bought a suburban home with a rather large garden after Danish standards. It is a little less than 1500 m2 (~16,146 sq ft). The size of the garden was the most compelling reason for buying the house, since we both wished to use it to produce food.
When I took an interest in raised beds, my wife gave me the book How to Grow More Vegetables. After reading it I thought double-digging beds was realistic, but with six beds it sounded like a little too much! Nevertheless, I tried it out, but instead of double-digging I decided to triple dig!!
The soil is sand—old coastline with only a thin layer of humus. Some of it is even old road with a layer of stone, broken bricks and everything suitable to make a firm surface. Yet again, every bed is or will be triple dug.
I have now triple-dug three rows of beds for 75 vines through the old road, and more will come for this purpose. I have planted six apple trees, three plum trees, three pear trees, two cherry trees, lots of berry bushes and one walnut.
Also I have triple-dug five beds, size 7.5 x 1.5 m for vegetables and already have the wish to enlarge them to 12 m length.
Since we wish to have fresh eggs we keep 6 to 8 hens. We also keep musk ducks alongside a fence towards public ground. This is a fantastic way to control the Iberian snail population, which is a plaque in our area.
The hens eat almost all our waste food. So we produce very little garbage.We also plan to have rabbits for meat. They will eat some of the cut-off wine stalks and other green waste.
I have adopted a combination of John Seymour's and John Jeavons' philosophies. This I shall explain in detail below...
I use John Jeavons' ideas of spacing, planting in flats, combining crops, using compost and always filling empty spaces. It seemed logical to incorporate John Seymour's ideas of having certain kind of crops in different beds and changing from year to year.
I currently have four beds:
- one with potatoes and leeks. There I use fresh manure from hens and from horses, since the crops seem to like that.
- one with root-vegetables, to which I provide calcium.
- one with pod-plants: beans and peas together with cabbage of all kinds.
- one with mixed vegetables, such as corn, squash, salad etc. This bed is given the main part of the compost.
The procedure is the above mentioned 4-year-shift.
I forgot to mention strawberries. I have planted them in a similar bed to the four mentioned above. On 6.5 m2 I cropped 25 kg last year from plants I started in September the year before! I expect no less than 40 kg this summer according to John Jeavons' book!
Last year’s harvest was our first harvest from raised beds, and let me say that I am more than convinced...
Parsnips 10 cm wide and almost a yard long! Carrots 30 cm long, normal potatoes grown to the size of baking potatoes, pea plants three times longer than one should expect - they tipped over and I had to lift the lot to find the pods, cabbage with stalks as thick as my wrist and beans in an amount that we have filled the freezer to use until new crop.
Also the Jerusalem artichokes grew so tall I had to cut them at two metres. But underneath was - and still is - more than three kilos of roots to each plant. They are so big that they resemble potatoes in size. Fantastic!
Of course there have also been some less impressive results—my leeks were eaten by flies, my onions were overruled by the red beets, and the celery was suppressed by the petal beets.
But in all I am very encouraged to continue. And I look forward to seeing if my wine will like the triple-dug beds. The plan is to grow strawberries to one side of the vines, and to leave the other side free for manure and to work with the vines.
My wife has prohibited growing grains such as wheat, oats etc. I can live with that since the remaining grass will serve as material for compost. Also the newly planted trees will shade the ground from the sun for most of the lawn. I suppose it is not easy to grow crops under a walnut tree!
I spread the word wherever and whenever I can to try to convince others to try raised beds instead of normal growing. It helps that I have great results to show.
I have made my own homepage: loevensteinvin.dk, so that I can continue to share what I learn as I progress.
Gardening is a life long study...
Greetings
Torben Loevenstein
Denmark
Note from the RenewAll Team: If you don't speak (or read) Danish, there are several free online text translation services (Google offers web page translation, for example) that you can use to translate the information on Torben's web site into your language of choice. And even if you don't translate the words, the images on the site are wonderful!