What Does a ‘Low Input’ Garden Look Like?

What does it mean to do low input gardening? Is it a realistic way to go about growing your own fruit and vegetables or is it pie-in-the-sky hippy nonsense? That’s what I hope to address in this article – the approach that I call low input gardening.

This is part of a bigger concept called ‘Self Provision Gardening’ which means you grow fruit and vegetables with a view of providing for some of your needs. It’s that word, some that is key. We’re not going for full self sufficiency here. It’s more of a desire to be able to replace some of what you buy in the stores with delicious, homegrown produce. For more on what SPG is, read this.

What is Low Input Gardening?

Gardening with minimal inputs is a foundation concept of self provision gardening. If you need to rely on a whole range of expensive and factory produced chemicals, treatments and pesticides just to make food grow, you’re kind missing the point.

I know where this idea comes from and I’m not saying I use no chemicals or pesticides in my garden. But I don’t rely on them and only use as a last resort (i.e. wasp infestations) or as a massive time saver (weed killer on my drive rather than hand pulling weeds for 2 hours every three weeks).

I’ve even been down the route of involved lawn care. Sure it was satisfying to see my lawn the way it was back then. But it was hardly something I wanted to emulate when it came to my veg patch.

Gardening with minimal inputs is going to take some work and improvisation but its so much more satisfying eating produce that you know came primarily from hard work, sweat and a fair dollop of ingenuity.

It’s also a more sustainable way to live. I’m no eco-warrior but I am tuned into the fact that we only have limited resource on this planet and we kinda need to be thinking about using less wherever we can. It might not matter to you, but it will to your children or their children.

A low input garden is all good, but it should also be a low output garden in terms of generating waste. All of your garden wastes and harvesting residues should go back into the garden (as much as is possible). Anything you can’t compost can be burned or used as mulch.

When I have woody sticks and stems, I let them dry by the compost heap and then burn once or twice a year. The ash goes back into the compost heap or is used as fertiliser for my fruit trees.

I don’t apply this strictly – a big part of SP Gardening is being realistic (not idealistic). I have a big hedge around my house and garden and the amount of clippings this produces is colossal – far more than my small-ish veg patch could cope with. So some of it goes to the municipal tip for making into compost there.

How Can you Incorporate Low Inputs into Your Garden

So how do you actually do low input gardening. I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s the easiest way or that it will give you the most vegetables per square foot. But what I will say is that it is satisfyingly sustainable giving you scrumptious sundries for all.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Make Your Own Compost

This is easily the easiest way to practice low input gardening. If you’re on the path to self-provision then a big part of that is compost. Think about it this way – you are making new soil. It doesn’t get more ‘self providing’ than that.

Compost doesn’t have to be complicated – nature does it all the time. I’m pretty lazy when it comes to compost. I just pile everything in a big heap and let nature do its thing. I put:

• All non meat/bread food waste on there,
• Urine
• Human hair
• Gardening residues
• Grass clippings
• Coffee grounds
• Animal manures

Pretty much anything that isn’t going to be a biohazard when it rots and will give me rich, high organic matter-based compost. My small garden creates around a cubic metre of compost in a year.

2. Work with Nature, Not Against It

This is a principle to live by in the garden. Think about it this way – nature is pretty much self sustaining when we’re not interfering. If you spray pesticides everywhere or rip out all the wild flowers for miles around you will do several things:

• Kill every living, crawling and flying thing in a significant area.
• Bump off beneficial insects as well as those that munch your crops.
• Deny bees and other pollinators food and sustenance.

Here’s something that’s really easy to do: make your garden a bit messy (I have three kids so it does this all on its own). Don’t manicure everything or clear up every last dead leaf and twig. Beneficial animals and bugs love this stuff. I’ve seen toads, hedgehogs and more ladybirds than I can count – all of which are a vegetable gardeners friend.

3. Be Prepared to Experiment

I was speaking to a gardening friend of mine who was complaining about eelworm in their potatoes and carrot flies in their carrots. I didn’t have either this year. Why?

Because I bought a variety of eelworm resistant potato and a type of carrot called ‘Resistafly’ – self explanatory I hope.

Sure I could have nuked the soil with additives and put up barriers to stop carrot fly. But it’s easier to grow crops that aren’t affected. Heritage varieties of veg are fun to grow – but they’ve often fallen out of fashion because of major weaknesses in breeding.

I’ve also tried to do more with fleeces and netting to stop pests getting to my veggies. It’s not full proof but it does work.

Another technique I learned from Steve Solomon‘s books is what I call ‘Give the Birds a Third’. This means that you mentally write off a third of your crops to pests like birds and other thieves. That way you’ll avoid the sense of loss when they eat your stuff.

Give Low Input Gardening a Go

This isn’t an exhaustive list of ideas or things you can do to lower the inputs into your garden. There are other things you can do like:

• Not over cropping your garden – giving it time to rest and recover
• Saving your own seed
• Using deep mulches of hard to compost garden wastes and cardboard
• Sowing cover crops and green manures

Have you got any low input gardening tips or tricks? Leave a comment below.

Neil

P.S. If you like my writing, you’ll probably enjoy my book. It’s called A Father’s MIssion.