When it comes to growing food for a living, you need to be really efficient. The best way that I know how to increase efficiency is to develop a system. Once you have a system, you don’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how you are going to do something. On my farm we have systems for almost everything, from working up the soil to picking the leafy greens. Growing vegetables requires a lot of repetition: there are always seeds to start, crops to transplant, rows to weed, and a whole lot more to do all the time, so why reinvent the wheel each week? Make a system and you will be happy. I wouldn’t lie to you on this. Because it is Spring I think the best place to start is with the soil.
All of the beds in my fields are the same width and the same length. This makes planning really easy. With a standard width, I know that my beds will have either one, two, or three rows. With a standard length I can figure out the yield easily, because most published sources of yield data will give you either a 100 foot bed yield or a one acre yield. In addition, the width and length I use divide each acre I farm into a nice round number. The width of all my beds is 60 inches. The width is measured from the center of one tractor rear tire to the center of the other tractor rear tire. Once I take out the area eaten up by the rolling tires, I am left with a growing area of about 48 inches. The tire tracks serve the rest of the season as paths for tractors as well as for humans. There are lots of different bed widths you can choose from, but I like 60 inches because I can step over the 48 inch growing area pretty easily, so I never have to walk on the bed tops and compress the soil. The bed width you choose is really up to you and often depends on the kinds of crops you grow. If you specialize in winter squash, then you will want reallly wide beds, like 72 inches. If you specialize in strawberries, then you will want really narrow beds, like 24 inches.
I grow a wide variety of crops in every season of the year. Because I don’t specilize, I need beds that are adaptable to lots of different crop families. The result of having just one bed size means that I have to make some compromises. For example: with just a slightly wider bed, I could fit on one more row of carrots, which would increase my production. The downside of that extra width is I can’t step over the beds, so I have to walk to the end of the row each time I need to get to another location on the farm. This takes more time and makes the farmer more tired. Because I run a small farm, having a space that is easily covered on foot is more valuable than a few more rows of carrots. The time I save stepping over rather than walking around makes up for the loss of production. The other side of the coin is that I don’t want to make the farm so walkable that I lose too much growing area to footpaths.
