Get Started: Core Gardening

It's time to get your garden beds ready for next year! I want to jump right into one of the easiest ways to prep your garden while giving it a jumpstart in replenishing nutrients organically. This is an introduction to "Core Gardening."

The concept of core gardening has been around for ages. The idea is to build a core of organic material down the center of your garden bed that will decompose to feed your plants and will hold moisture to reduce strain from drought. The beauty is that you can take your depleted crops that are currently in your garden beds and bury them right where they are! The benefit is two-fold. You don't have to haul your plants away somewhere else like a compost pile, you can just bury them where they are; you are also putting the exact nutrients that were removed from the soil back into it. Let me explain.

The garden looks so beautiful in October!

When you grow a crop, it has certain requirements for minerals and nutrients. One crop may draw a lot of nitrogen from the ground and not touch the phosphorus as much. Another bed may be full of crops that hardly need any nitrogen, but they absolutely decimate the potassium. Well, much of those nutrients that the plants took was used to build the plant and is therefore still present within the leftover material. Rather than taking those plants away to a compost pile, you can replenish a lot of the needed nutrients quickly by direct-composting it into a core.

So what do you do? It's easy!  First, pull all your plants out of the bed and just pile them up nearby. If the plants have seeds present, try to remove those portions. As we are going to bury these plants, we want to avoid volunteers coming up next year as weeds. These portions would be good to use for biochar. 

Now that all the organic material is removed, you're going to dig a trench down the center of the bed. About 6-7 inches deep is good. As you dig it out, just push all the soil you removed up to one side. It's going to be used in a moment and there's no point in hauling it away.

I'm almost disappointed by the lack of hands...

Next, you're going to take your pile of garden brush and start laying it down in your trench. This is your core. This material is going to decompose just as it would in your compost pile. Only we're doing it right below where your plants will be planted. They get to feed from the source! If you need more material to fill the trench, go ahead and use what else you'd otherwise add to your compost. Grass clippings are great, grab a strawbale from a harvest party and use that (I've seen some folks bury the full bales as the cores!), you could even use kitchen scraps and autumn leaves you raked up. Just get that good organic material directly into the ground.

Work your core!

Now take that soil you removed and bury your core. The core will start slowly breaking down during the upcoming months in prep for spring planting. By April, your garden will have a thick layer of rich humus that will hold onto moisture and release food for your plants! Easy and beneficial, exactly how we like it at Third-Acre!