Planting the Keyhole Salad Garden

Several years ago we arranged dirt into a “U” shaped formation called a keyhole. See the post here. This garden has functioned beautifully in that the ingredients for a salad can all be picked from one area. Before the keyhole it took a lot of walking to gather everything. Now we can pick along one side of the pathway, turn at the end, and then pick along the other side.

Almost as soon as the snow melted this spring, we’ve been using perennial onions, chives, sorrel, upland cress, lovage and garlic chives. These are perennials that appear every year. This year some mache showed up. It was not planted, but somehow seeds must have drifted over from a nearby cold frame.

The keyhole garden has perennial onions, lovage, many clumps of chives, other perennials, and now rows of seeds.

Even with all of the perennials, there is still plenty of room for some annuals. This past weekend I seeded rows of greens. Two of the rows will have red and green varieties of butterhead, romaine and leaf lettuces. Another row will consist of three types of arugula. The Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog is offering wasabi arugula which we considered a must-try for something new this year. Can’t wait to taste it. A row of mixed greens will include mizuna, escarole, minutina and tatsoi.

I added some cilantro and radish seeds between the chives, and seeded more garlic chives at the end of the row. Nasturtium seeds will be stuck in along the edges when the weather gets a bit warmer.

We are looking forward to many eclectic salads! -G.H.

It’s so... well, convenient! An Update on the Salad Garden

In fall of 2011, I posted about starting up a new salad garden. Click here for the post, and here for a 2012 update. Our salad greens were being picked from different garden areas and you had to wander around a lot to get from one to another. My thinking for the new garden was to get all or most of the salad veggies into one place to make it more convenient to go out and pick a salad. Kind of like a supermarket aisle entirely devoted to salad, except ours would have lots more variety and cost a lot less.  

I made the salad garden in the shape of a keyhole; that is, a three sided garden bed with a central pathway. It could be called a horseshoe garden if the pathway were a more rounded shape. The idea of a keyhole garden derives from permaculture. It makes better use of a garden-able area than rows; maximizing plant-growing space while minimizing pathways.

For a salad garden a keyhole seemed like a perfect shape. You can walk into it with your picking basket and pick your salad greens along one side of the path, and wander out while doing the same along the other side. This little trip should theoretically fill your basket with lettuces, greens, green onions and whatever else is growing at the time for your daily salad.   

Before making the garden, I had visualized it, mentally walking in and picking. I do this with all of my new garden areas. Visualizing, for me is a lot easier than drawing a plan on paper; a little map showing the shape of the garden bed and where to put each of the plants. A paper plan almost never pans out in reality. There are always changes. Visualizing lets me rethink things on the fly, and is a system that works. It’s only afterwards that I draw a diagram of what I did. See our earlier post on keeping a notebook. The notebook helps to keep track of what was planted and where.

The Salad Garden as viewed from the back

The salad garden that I visualized, and then shoveled and raked into existence is working very well. It’s pretty much like I had imagined it. You can walk in and pick chives, lettuce, and arugula along one side. At the far end, yank out a perennial onion and snatch some lovage leaves. On your way out, snip some pieces of upland cress, nab some nasturtium leaves and, if you like, pull up a singular clove of wild garlic. There’s also Giant Red Mustard (great stuff!), and some self-seeded cilantro is starting up. 

So many flavors all in one place!. We gather a salad every day, and this garden makes it easy and a real pleasure. It is functional, handy, and convenient. We do love a good salad, and now it’s so easy to pick! -jmm

The Salad Garden is Coming up Chives

Last fall I wrote about starting a new garden. This is a permaculture-inspired keyhole garden designed for picking ingredients for salads.

Chives and Upland Cress

It’s coming up chives. And perennial onions, lovage, and upland cress. And some cilantro. Around the edges some giant red mustard are starting up. Perennials and reseeding annuals will anchor this garden. Things we won’t have to plant every year.

Gil has put in seeds for lettuces, arugula, epazote, cilantro, and root parsley, increasing the diversity.

Cilantro and Chives

I'm thinking of moving some ramps in too. Ramps are wild garlic. Years ago I planted a garlic clove from the supermarket. It grew, but as a spindly, single tiny bulb, not cloves. The plant went to seed and more bulbs grew, and the clump spread a little more every year. I was told it was no good as garlic. I ignored both the advice and the clump. Now, I find in places like Bon Appetite magazine recipes calling for ramps. Isn’t that funny. So I think I will move some into the salad garden.

The little keyhole garden makes me happy. Not just that it is bordered on two sides by roses and peonies, but also that I like to walk into it. And then out of it on the same pathway. It will be fun to pick salads here this summer. What a clever idea it is. Really quite the place already. It’s growing on me. -jmm

A Keyhole Salad Garden

Why did we not think of it earlier? Salad! How many places in the yard do we go to in order to gather one? To the garden over to the west of house, then way over to the garden to the east of the house, and a cold frame or two or three in between!

Have you ever mentally kicked yourself for not thinking of something sooner? Kinda what I did when I thought, “ok, theres all these garden spaces but no coherent spot for gathering the one food group we eat every day.”

First of all, theres nothing ordinary about any of our salads. Each one starts with a mix of greens and some onion, and then it’s whatever else is available. Right now nasturtiums are looking beautiful- they’ve vined themselves all over some heather and some lavender plants and it’s all really pretty. And we think the leaves and flowers are pretty in salads too. They add such nice peppery zip.

Making a garden just for salad was a sudden brainstorm. If only there was a handy spot near to the house! And there was! If only a few flowers were moved out first. Very do-able!

The new salad keyhole garden

A close-following brainstorm turned the design into a keyhole. I wrote about the keyhole earlier, here and here. The shape is ideal for a salad garden. You can walk down a center path and pick stuff along three sides of it. Fill up the salad basket and, voila, you’re done!

A great idea being too good to waste, I got busy last weekend and repurposed rows of flowers into a single-path horseshoe shape. The area is about 20 feet long x 15 feet wide and is nestled in between roses and a stone wall. After some very sweaty raking and shoveling- the weather being oddly warm for this time of year- I worked in some manure to get things off to a good start, and then started moving plants.

The chive hedge now lines the new central pathway. Lovage is transplanted to one back corner, and perennial onions to the other. These should colonize and form thick patches.

Reseeding annuals populate one side of the horseshoe. Most of them were stuck in the ground casually, because it is their seeds that will make new plants next year. They are upland cress, cilantro, and giant red mustard. Love those reseeders!

The other side of the horseshoe is left unplanted. This is for non-hardy annuals. In spring we will seed lettuces, arugula, several types of basil, and nasturtium. What's a late-summer salad without nasturtium! Wow, I feel good about this garden! -jmm

A Keyhole Garden in Lesotho

We had to pass this along to you. This is a fabulous video from OrganicConsumers.org showing how keyhole gardens are being constructed in Lesotho. In difficult terrain and climate, they are growing beautiful vegetables, and it is the young people who are learning how to do this. Much fancier than ours (click here)!


  

Keyhole Garden

...whats happening with it now

Last fall i wrote about starting a keyhole garden. The term, keyhole, refers to the garden's shape- it's designed to maximize growing space while minimizing pathway. Specifically, a continuous three sided bed wraps around a central pathway. More growing space means you can grow more plants, and less path translates into easier maintenance.

Last fall's post gave step by step instructions for creating sheet mulch. The sheet mulch becomes a growing medium for plants. This is a way of starting a garden bed on top of sod, or sand and rocks as we have here. No digging, no tilling. We've done this many times to make our raised beds.

Anyway, I ended the post with no idea of what to plant there. And since, I've thought about it. In a series of three posts: Perennial, Vegetable, Forest gardens I noted a few differences about these three different areas. For me, it stands out that the annual veggie garden is really unsustainable. I want things to be simpler- gardening is not my only passion! Wouldn't it be great to grow food plants in a way that is simpler, less fussy, easier to maintain? Like, say, the perennial flower garden which, here, anyway, seems to thrive on total neglect. And so, an idea hit me: the keyhole will be a perennial food garden.

Well, this was either revelation or inspiration, not sure which. Or maybe both. So off I went with a shovel and a bucket digging up pieces of food perennials that we already have- chives, perennial onions, lovage, and rhubarb. I'm not putting asparagus in this garden because the layers of mulch may not be deep enough.

This is one side of the keyhole- as you can see there's not much happening here yet. 

And, I'm putting in some reseeding annuals to scatter themselves in and around the perennials. I figure that if a plant is hardy enough to be there from one year to the next, then it qualifies for this garden. On that note, I scrounged for whatever is coming up and found upland cress, giant red mustard, claytonia, mache. Turnip, rhutabaga, kale, and parsnips are some more options I may add later.

The keyhole from the stone wall in the back of it. 

And, finally, I planted seeds for Good King Henry, perennial kale, and New Zealand spinach-  plants that are suggested for permaculture. These are new to us, and we'll keep you posted on what transpires with them.

The plants and seeds were stuck in with no particular plan. I'm very sure that plants will be arranged and rearranged until it all gets right. And that is a big difference from the veggie garden- those nice neat rows do not fit this space. -jmm

The Keyhole Garden

The Permaculture Series - exploring the concepts of sustainability: gardening that takes care of itself with less work and better productivity, one topic at at time.

One of permaculture’s many ideas is the “keyhole” garden, referring to the shape of it. One could instead call it “U” or horseshoe-shaped. A keyhole garden consists of a central pathway surrounded on three sides by garden beds. The shape is intended to maximize growing area while minimizing pathways.

We decided to try this idea. Our chosen space is about a 13 x 14 foot rectangle. We first took out some surfacing tree roots, and the movable rocks. The rocks are now a small stone wall behind the area, building up the back of it that had been a downhill slope. This leveled the area and will help to keep rainwater there. Rain is our source of water for this. It is out of reach of the hose. And, too, another concept of permaculture (there are many!) is of finding ways to retain and use rainwater, and we'll get to that in a future post.

After preparing the space we then figured out on which side the path should enter and how wide to make the path (wide enough, we decided, to turn a wheelbarrow around). The next step was to create garden-able soil by layering compostable materials. Our other garden areas were also started with compost instead of digging. The materials are built upward from ground level instead of digging downward (there’s too many rocks here to dig). This works beautifully- our plants have done very well in it.

We began with forest land for our keyhole garden, but if you have lawn instead, the same idea works just as well. We’re giving the layering process below in case you’d like to try it too.

We're not sure yet exactly what we want to plant. We want to try some of the plants touted by permaculturalists. These include Good King Henry, fennel, perennial kale, seakale, and other edible perennials. We'll think about this through the winter as we go through seed and plant catalogs. The "perma" part of permaculture means permanent, indicating the use of perennial or reseeding annuals that are hardy in our climate.

Here is how to assemble the layers, and I should say there’s no need to be a perfectionist about it. If you’re starting with lawn, cut the grass as short as you can get it.

1. Spread any soil amendments that are needed to improve your garden soil. Here, we need lime to convert forestland, and we like to add alfalfa pellets (this is sold as bunny food at the farm supply).

2. Top the amendments with a sprinkling of manure.

3. Next is a crucial layer: newspapers and/or cardboard. Use the black and white newspaper pages, not the shiny ads. Layer them 1 - 2” thick and overlap the edges. If you are shading out lawn be sure to make the layer thick to prevent any sunlight getting through. This layer and the ones beneath it will attract worms which will eat through the papers and cardboard. Worm manure is excellent for your plants.

4. Now add about a foot of mulch material. This is an important layer that will break down into a hefty amount of compost. We are using pine boughs from some pine trees we just had taken down, and some raked leaves. Scrounge for what you need for this layer- trimmings from shrubbery, grass clippings, raked leaves and so on, or go to the farm supply and get bales of straw (not hay which can reseed the area with grass).

5. Top it off with a layer of compost. You can sprinkle on some dirt also if you have some handy.

The layers will break down into compost. The keyhole garden will not require tilling or digging. The ground beneath the layers will loosen and become enriched by compost and worm activity (if you have sod it will rot and loosen up). Although we are told you can go ahead and put plants into this right away (plant them with compost surrounding the roots), we prefer to let ours age over the winter. In spring we’ll let you know what we’ve decided to plant in it. -jmm