A Lean Approach to Spring Gardening

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ben Hartman takes us through the spring garden planning process from soil prep, to the crops you want to grow. He even covers the systems he uses to prioritize tasks. As he combines these, he creates an efficient and effective process for growing. Epic Gardening Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/3HhvCfK Botanical Interests Shop Homepage: https://growepic.co/3vAxkpW Book Collection Page: https://growepic.co/48UPelH EG Homesteading Book: https://growepic.co/3tPf3EG Connect With Ben Hartman: Ben Hartman is the author of The Lean Micro Farm (Chelsea Green, 2023) and The Lean Farm (Chelsea Green, 2016), winner of the prestigious Shingo Institute Research and Professional Publication Award. In 2017, Ben was named one of fifty emerging green leaders in the United States by Grist, and published a companion guide to The Lean Farm titled The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables. Ben and his wife, Rachel Hershberger, own and operate Clay Bottom Farm in Goshen, Indiana, where they make their living growing specialty crops on 1/3 acre of land in production. Ben has developed an online course in lean farming, which can be found at claybottomfarm.com The Lean Farm Books The Lean Farm Books on Amazon, Bookshop.org, Chelsea Green Website Instagram YouTube Facebook Website Shop the Store As an exclusive for listeners, use code THEBEET for 5% off your entire order on our store, featuring our flagship Birdies Raised Beds. These are the original metal raised beds, lasting up to 5-10x longer than wooden beds, are ethically made in Australia, and have a customizable modular design. Shop now and get 5% off your first order. Get Our Books Looking for a beginner's guide to growing food in small spaces? Kevin’s book, Field Guide to Urban Gardening, explains the core, essential information that you'll need to grow plants, no matter where you live! He also wrote Grow Bag Gardening to provide you with specialized knowledge that can bring you success when growing in fabric pots. Preorder Kevin’s newest book Epic Homesteading if you are looking to turn your home into a thriving homestead! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well spring is almost here my friends and in San Diego I have to say it
0:17.2	basically is spring but I'm still biding my time waiting to plant out the true spring Garden and we have Ben Hartman back on the show
0:25.8	author of the Lean Micro Farm out now audiobook out as well the Lean Farm
0:30.7	and the farmer at Claybottom Farm.
0:34.0	And so we've talked, I guess a bit,
0:36.0	been more about the setup, the philosophy of lean farming,
0:40.0	and then some of the ways that you can be wasteful and some of the ways you've solved those
0:44.6	problems now we turn to spring and in your case farming is a business it's
0:52.3	something that does have to support you so you have to be
0:54.0	very precise I'd imagine about how you're planning that out so I'm curious how
1:00.4	does that work in the lien methodology for you?
1:03.0	Yeah, sure, the way I describe it in the book is that we try to farm like a tree.
1:08.0	And one of the things that trees do is they work ahead and in fact they work many seasons ahead
1:16.9	So think about a pecan tree and it can take 15 years or more before you actually harvest fruit
1:22.2	But in all that time the tree is
1:24.4	the roots are pulling minerals up from the earth, depositing minerals in the
1:27.8	leaves, those leaves fall on the ground and refertilizes the soil and makes that tree stronger.
1:34.0	So that when the tree is actually bearing fruit,
1:37.5	then especially when you think of apple trees, peach trees,
1:40.5	they have this strength to carry the load. And so the way we put that principle in
1:46.1	practice on our farm is to we actually do our spring bed preparation in October, November of the year before.
1:56.4	So and we do very early spring planting because a lot of, there are crops that don't require a lot of soil heat so we can plant myzuna's some spinach
	...

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