Looking at all of the data we collected last year (content warning: lots of graphs!) detailing how much time we spent on different tasks and when, there are interesting similarities and differences between the gardens. Some have more to do with the method or approach of the garden, other differences relate to the seasons, and a few are because we were too busy at other times of the year to keep up with things.
0:00 What is the Busiest Time of the Year?
0:58 Time is Hard to Measure
2:14 Family Scale Gardens
3:42 Different Tasks
4:36 Extensive Garden
5:47 Intensive Garden
6:48 No-Dig Garden
7:40 Polyculture Garden
8:42 Simple Garden
9:53 Polytunnel Garden
11:10 Time vs Yield
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36 Comments
This was immensely helpful! Thank you so much!! I'm a fairly new gardner, and this year is the year I'm getting serious and planting with a schedule, plan, harvesting, canning, prepping, capturing rain water, heating/cooling my house without electricity.
Your vegetables look amazing!! Healthy and nutritious !
Watching from Missouri USA..I hope your garden is on our land we have 23 acres but All trees around I have little vegetables garden though.. thanks for your video ❤️
Hey could you make a step by step video of how to properly make a garden row with hand tools?
You are by far the most interesting of the gardening channels. Love the uptick in videos recently. Always click on them as soon as I see them
Really a good lesson for gardeners I believe.
super useful
Whats that organic material you are collecting at 1:47 https://youtu.be/nQs45NimCOU?t=108 please?
Three hours a week on each garden. Is that both of you, total? Is that including off-site work like ordering seeds, planning schemes, orering equipment? That's pretty amazingly efficient. I seem to spend about the same number of hours on on my 8x4m garden just to keep on top of it, producing no food and a some flowers. You produce so very much – and there's so much work. I love your careful data gathering. It's so useful! I hope you are celebrating your successes, Bruce.
Thanks for another video. I remember a scatter plot from before about harvest per plant or per m^2, and what i recall was that beans had a very low yield. But, thinking about the simple garden as a time efficiency system, how bad do you think letting beans grow all year and then harvesting the dried beans would be? Does that reduce the flushes and yield. It seems like every time you mention spending a lot of time harvesting it's either salad greens, or a image of beans. Any ways to turn one from High yield high time, to low time?
You have such great work ethic. It’s good you always take into ming the gardener’s needs and or limits !
Have you tried mixing in some purchased compost with the unfinished homemade compost ? Seems it may soak up some nutrients during the process.
Always like your intros!
Your whole videos are so interesting and informative.
Thank You!
It looks like if you were to measure each garden's efficiency by it's time per amount harvested, then the simple garden wins, followed by the no-dig garden. The extensive garden comes out the worst.
I start out with the "simple" garden. It ends up a "polyculture"….
I guess I need to work on planning.
I don't really know how to deal with the polyculture garden either
would a wheel hoe save time in bed prep?
Thanks Bruce!
Hi, thanks for your videos! Here in California since we don’t have hard frosts I had planted potatoes a couple weeks back. Temperature is in the 50F range. The sprouts came up but seem to be turning black and dying off. Any thoughts on what could be causing it?
Excellent video. Lot to learns
Just one word, SimplePollyTunnel!
We had a unique experience this summer. We worked on a farm and had our backyard garden as well.
The farm was very consistent with what you experienced, especially your Intensive garden. But in our home garden, it was almost the reverse, and thankfully so.
I think a big reason was the backyard garden was made in lasagna style and no dig approach. As a result, much less weed pressure and obviously smaller scale. Where at the farm, harvesting, successional sowing, preparing fall/winter sowing irrigation, and weed management made May through June extremely busy.
Fascinating stuff, every "answer" has complex and sometimes unseen consequences.
Cheers
You are very dialed in man. Great job.
Im in mid-southern Illinois, a 6a/b zone. We will have several areas of different garden types this year. I've learned so much from you that I feel confident that I can manage the crops. I've a coop and large run for 15 young hens that just started laying in the last two weeks!
I'll have a 16x20ft greenhouse finishing up in the spring. I have plans drawn up for both front yards (each side of the driveway will have several sizes of raised beds for crops and hugelkulture areas for flower bulbs.) and when we get a decently warm day, my niece and I will be planning the large yard between our homes. It's almost an acre total, and I have over 300 types of seeds ready to go. Garlic has been in the ground since November and is doing great. I am immensely excited about this year to see what is possible to feed 11 of us combined, plus the animals.
Tl;dr Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us so we can be as successful as possible. 😉❤
There is just the two of us here and I have 6 raised beds which more than feed us. Neighbours get the surplus. I try to work out small plantings of a wide variety – it changes every year. Watching you encourages me to experiment! Thank you!
You will find that each year the labor aspect will get more and more difficult, so planning to reduce the labor inputs needed is a good thing. Over the last several years I've shifted a lot of my effort from annual veg to perennial fruit, and almost all of my veg production beds have been switched over to deep compost mulch no-till. This has really reduced the amount of work needed, but on the other hand on beautiful winter days like today I wander around the garden and orchard looking for something to do, as it's also what I do for fun, so there's a balance there…
You have probably answered this but which garden do you think gives you a better yeild your no dig garden or your more conventional garden
thank you!
Love your work, thanks for these videos. I would really like if you could share more details about your planting plans. I don’t think you have any videos about that, but I would find it extremely valuable. How do you plan what and when to sow and transplant plants? How much can fit in beds and staggered sowings… etc. I would love your perspective on these things as you plan your year.
I appreciate the time it takes to make videos and collect materials for it, so I understand that you might not have time for this. But I hope you’ll consider making such video in the future. Thanks! 🌱🥦
For tropical gardeners it's always busy all year long. We don't have off season. Sometimes exhausting honestly. I miss the time when i lived in Europe when i can abandoned my garden for months. 😁
This is by far the best and the most thorough garden channel in youtube. Greetings from Indonesia !
Very interesting video and a lots of informations. Thank you.
For me it is the week before the last frost date. I trust weathermen pretty much, so I always plan to plant stuff 2 weeks before my last frost date and then just watch the local weatherman. Two weeks before the last frost date, I plant stuff that would probably survive a cold day, and then the week before the last frost date is when I have a ton of stuff ready to go into the ground if the weatherman gives the thumbs up.
A video on your planting plans for each garden would be fantastic! Keep up the good work.
Just saw your comfrey plants! Might you sometime make a video on the ways you use it?
In the Polyculture Garden, do you use a specific system like square-foot-gardening or just seeing what fits as going from there?
what is that awesome little cloche that you put on the squash at 1:07? did you make this and if so can you share? love all your info, details and data.
First!