Market Garden

Our mission is to grow a wide variety of nutritious vegetables while regenerating the ecosystem and soil, developing a sustainable profitable business to support quality employment and build close relationships with the community around us.

No-dig gardening

Tillage and plowing are known and proven to destroy the structure of the soil and deplete it of vital nutrients by volatilizing them and sending them into the atmosphere creating abundant greenhouse gasses. These mechanical disturbances also lead to increased evaporation, erosion, oxidation, pollution, and weed pressure.

The No-dig approach is a method to grow vegetables while disturbing and exposing the soil minimally, keeping a diversity of living plants in the ground, allowing mycorrhizal fungi develop its web, supporting plant health, building soil fertility, and to develop regenerative cropping systems that produce high output. We believe that no-dig techniques are the best approach to not only sustain but to regenerate the already depleted soils by assisting and mimicking natural processes to increase the organic matter and microbial life. 

Bio-intensive gardening

The term biointensive broadly refers to a horticultural method in which growers maximize crop yields from a minimum area of land, while seeking to preserve—or even improve—the quality of the soil. Drawing on the experience of 19th-century French vegetable growers and Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic principles, the biointensive method was refined in northern California in the 1960s. The goal is to space the crops such that their leaves touch each other when the plants reach three quarters of their full size. At maturity, the foliage will cover all of the growing area, effectively creating a living mulch. This strategy of spacing the crops this closely has three main advantages: it increases the yield per square meter, greatly cuts down on the amount of weeding and irrigation required, and allows many day-to-day gardening tasks to be more efficient.

With this in mind, we have not arranged our garden in the rows typically used in mechanised farming where crops are spaced according to the dimensions of big tractors and weeding machinery. Instead, we grow our crops in standardised permanent raised beds dimensioned for optimal work ergonomy. For establishing the beds, we will invest in large quantities of organic matter (compost, biochar etc.) and clay with the aim to effectively creating a rich and fertile soil.