Over
the years, the convenience and abundance of food and
our active life style took us as a country away from
the idea of growing our own food and the home
vegetable garden. Now we rely on foreign owned truck
farms, as well as food shipped to us from over seas.
Like oil, we need to develop an independence from
other countries on our food supply. We can do this
by supporting our local independent produce grower
at the Farmer’s Markets, as well as buy and consume
foods in season to help reduce shipping of food over
vast distances.With this in mind, Empire
Landscaping, Inc. has established a demonstration garden,
where we can teach gardening to generations of
Americans who have forgotten or never been exposed
to the concept of growing their own food. The
gardening concept we want to teach is intensive
raised bed gardening.
We selected the raised bed garden concept as well as
several other intense gardening techniques to
demonstrate how to grow the most produce possible
from a given space. A raised bed garden reduces
wasted space and concentrates our efforts to give us
better yields with less labor.
In addition to raised beds, container gardening, as
well as upright gardening (trellises, nets, strings,
cages, and poles) further increases the efficiency
of our garden. Additional techniques such as inter
planting and modified spacing, can be used to
increase production.
An intensive garden requires good early planning to
make the best use of time and space in the garden.
Even an experienced gardener moving to the
Bitterroot Valley will need to adapt their
techniques to the valley’s growing conditions and
quirks.
Our raised bed garden is open to the public. We will
be glad to teach you and make recommendations
regarding garden orientation, soils, varieties of
vegetables to plant, seed selection, fertilizer, and
the all-important tasks of watering and pest
control. We are even contemplating a fall workshop
on proper canning techniques. We will post here
through out the season the progress of our garden.