Ep. 124 – Creating a New Garden Bed with Milpa

Grow Food, Not Lawns

I hate mowing the grass. I especially hate mowing the grass along the quarter mile driveway at my homestead. I haven’t mowed it in years. But I now see it as a missed opportunity to plant more garden beds and food forest beds instead of (prairie) grass. Grow Food, Not Lawns, right?

How you create a new garden bed depends on what time of the year it is. Most people sheet mulch by covering an area with cardboard, then layers of compost and woodchips. This works well, but only if you do it in the Fall AND you get lots of rain in the Winter to break down the cardboard. This year we had lots of snow in January and the bed that I created last Fall broke down pretty well, although while digging a hole in the new bed to plant a hazelnut bush, I dug up a piece of cardboard that wasn’t completely broken down.

To Use Cardboard or Not Use Cardboard?

Permaculture leaders, like Ben Falk and Paul Wheaton, are increasingly warning against using cardboard as the base when creating new garden beds over lawn grass. And scientists warn against using cardboard as well. Like this article:

Cardboard Does Not belong on Your Soil. Period. – (Maybe that should have been an exclamation point)

Cardboard reportedly has dioxin and PFAs and “forever chemicals”. The article also says that cardboard inhibits soil life. Only plastic sheet mulching is worse (supposedly).

The article recommends adding a VERY thick layer of woodchips on the grass, then the compost, and more woodchips. In my experience, this only works if you have lots of time for the first layer of woodchips to breakdown.

My friend Jason at George Washington Carver Farm in Kansas City built his soil with large amounts of woodchips.

Grow Food, Not Lawns. — George Washington Carver Farm in Kansas City

The biggest issue I have with using cardboard is that no matter how hard I try to remove all the tape, I end up digging up plastic tape pieces for years afterward.

I do use cardboard and woodchips for paths, however.

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I use Milpa to create new garden beds

In the Spring, I don’t have time to wait for the cardboard to break down. I would lose the entire planting season.

My soil is compacted heavy clay, with little worm activity in places, so I would have to add a large amount of woodchips and compost to get something to plant in. And the grass always manages to poke through and take over anyway.

Using a broadfork — Using my Meadow Creature Broadfork to turn over the sod.

So I take my trusty Meadow Creature Broadfork and turn over the sod. Then I add a layer of compost. I sow with a Milpa seed mix, and then cover with a light layer of woodchips.

Milpa Seed – Buy or Mix Your Own Seed

What is Milpa? It is a mix of seeds, usually with the Three Sisters – corn, squash, and beans – as the core plants. Beans to add nitrogen, corn to provide structure, and squash to grow up the corn or out. Milpa also has other seeds, with a focus to grow as much food as possible on a small garden plot. It sometimes can have buckwheat, okra, cucumbers, greens, radishes, or anything that you want.

The idea is to spread out the harvest through the seasons as well.

milpa seasons — Milpa allows harvests spread across the seasons.

You can buy a mix of seeds or you can create your own mix.

Green Cover Milpa seed mix with 40 seeds

In the past, I have bought seed my Milpa seed from Green Cover Seed. However, this sells out fast each year, and in 2022 and 2023 it was sold out for most of the season, so I created my own mix:

Grazing corn from Green Cover Seed or some short corn like Strawberry popcorn from Baker Creek. This should be lightly mixed in so that it doesn’t shadow out everything else. Remember – the core of Milpa is corn, with squash growing up the stalk, and beans feeding nitrogen in the soil.
Red Ripper Cowpeas from Green Cover Seed (I have saved seed from previous years).
Squash, melons, pumpkins – leftover from previous years or I acquired from a Spring seed swap.
Mancan Buckwheat from Green Cover Seed
Daicon radish or some radish that you like. Daicon radish breaks up the soil.
Cucumbers that will produce early and then vine along the ground. (If you like cucumbers. I do not.)
Pollinators – I use the Perennial Pollinator mix from Green Cover Seed or mix your own with calendula, echinacea/coneflower, hairy vetch, clover. However, if you are using Milpa to prep a bed and build soil to grow some annuals in that bed in later years, you do not want to use perennials.

You will get a dominant crop based on when you plant. If you plant early in the Spring, the buckwheat and beans will be dominant and the squash will be dominant.

Milpa gardening — Milpa bed with beans and buckwheat dominant

Conclusion – Plant a Milpa Bed!

By using this technique you can create a new garden bed with minimal effort, avoid using cardboard, and get an abundant crop in the first year (even with poor clay soil). At the end of the season chop and drop the chaff from the buckwheat and beans to mulch for the Winter.

Grow Food, Not Lawns.

GrowNutTrees.com

Elderberry cuttings are still available but Hurry before they come out of dormancy. Now have pecan seedlings and red mulberry seedlings. Order now at GrowNutTrees.com.

Buying from our Kansas homestead, with nut trees grown and adapted to the Midwest, will make them much more likely to be successful on your homestead or in your yard.

Highly recommend Joseph Lofthouse’s Landrace Gardening book:

Gear that I use and recommend: Meadow Creature Broadfork 14. I have used this to turn over sod for new Milpa garden beds, and even hand dug swales with it. Bulletproof.

Check out the NEW 2024 Homesteading Bundle from Permies, which has 35 e-books, courses, videos.

What I really liked:

The Backyard Forest Garden e-book
Agroforestry
Restoration Agriculture: Designing Your Perennial Farm presentation from Permaculture Voices by Mark Shepard
Permaculture Thorns, A Book About Trying to Build Permaculture Community, by Paul Wheaton.
Plus 2 books by Nicole Sauce.