Hmmmm that's interesting...pigs destroy the land where I live....well they're not native. Apparently we have more wild pigs in Australia than people.
In uncontrolled situations, yes, they destroy the ground. But I use cattle panels fastened together and move their pen every few days. This keeps the ground from becoming compacted and from smelling. I just keep rotating them around the garden...we are about halfway through it. It should be done about the time the hogs are ready for market.
Sunny, your garden is HUGE. How do you space your crops and rows? Do you use wide beds? Do you market garden? Do you actually use all of the veggies you produce? I can only imagine what I'd do if I had that much space that I could call garden instead of lawn. Fruit trees, perhaps some grains, lots of green manure crops. However, I know I'd never have enough time to tend it all or even harvest it all, let alone store it all. I'm hoping to toy around with making a solar dehydrator. Perhaps I'll get it going next summer.
Well. I have rows of varying spaces, and I learned that some were not spaced far enough apart (like I should have given the tomatoes even more space). I did a lot of winter squash, and those take a lot of room. I did corn, three seedlings, and that took a lot of room too. But I did have several beds of greens. The rows average 40 feet long, and I guess there are 30(?) of them plus the longer rows where I did corn, sunflowers, squashes, etc,all mixed together at the north side of the garden.
We ate entirely from the garden last year, except for milk, and I canned and froze an insane amount of food and gave a lot away. But it was not as productive as it should have been as I got sick somewhere around mid June and did not fertilize and care for it like I had planned. So the squash bugs got most of the squashes, which really cut production. I had considered selling veggies if it took off, and I might, or wholesale them to a local farm store or do the farmer's market, if it does well next year.
I'm only able to get away with it because I'm home except for Saturdays. If I was working FT, this would never happen. And I have a big family of all boys...they eat like locusts. They like helping out too, to some extent.
I could make it even bigger...I have more than an acre we haven't fenced in, and I could grow mushrooms in our woods. But this is way more than enough!
that is a LOT of cardboard and mulch! But that is basically where I'm headed. My distaste for weeding is first and foremost my driving force behind some of what I'm doing. My goal is no-till after I get the pigs through there this year to add organic matter to our rocky, clay soil.
