How to Grow More Vegetables on Less Land

For more than 30 years John Jeavons has been preaching the benefits of small-scale, sustainable farming. Now, on a farm just outside Willits, Jeavons operates the nonprofit Ecology Action and teaches his methods to gardeners from as far away as Siberia, Africa and Latin America.

It takes about 15,000 to 30,000 square feet of land to feed one person the average U.S. diet,” he says. “I’ve figured out how to get it down to 4,000 square feet. How? I focus on growing soil, not crops.

In 1972, John Jeavons formed Ecology Action and started farming nearly four acres in Palo Alto. Alan Chadwick, pioneer of the French intensive/biodynamic method of farming, came up from Santa Cruz to teach classes. The first edition of “How to Grow More Vegetables” was published two years later. At last, Jeavons was finding answers to the question he’d been asking farmers for years.

He took the best of Chadwick’s intensive farming techniques, including double-digging, composting and closely-spaced planting, and added a few ideas of his own. An organic farm should be a closed system, he reasoned. Off-the-farm inputs like manure, bagged compost, alfalfa meal and liquid kelp all require additional land, water and resources to produce. That, in Jeavon’s view, is hardly sustainable agriculture.

8 steps to grow more vegetables via biointensive gardening

• Double-dug, raised beds.

Loosening the soil to a depth of 24 inches allows roots to penetrate more deeply and creates a raised bed effect. Sounds like hard work? John Jeavons’ video “Dig It” demonstrates an Aikido-style movement that makes double-digging almost effortless.

• Composting. A healthy compost pile is key to replenishing the soil.
• Intensive planting.

“Ignore the spacing instructions that come with your seeds,” Jeavons says “Plant seedlings so close that when they are mature, the leaves touch. This keeps soil moist and prevents weeds from sprouting.

• Companion planting.

Green beans love strawberries, corn provides shade to cucumbers, and fast-maturing radishes grow well in between slower-growing carrots.

• Carbon farming.

Corn, millet and oats, along with other seed and grain crops, make up an important part of the diet and provide plenty of high-carbon additions to the compost pile.

• Calorie farming.

Growing a year’s food supply means focusing on high- calorie, space-efficient foods like potatoes and parsnips.

• Open-pollinated seeds.

Special hybrids aren’t needed in healthy soil, Jeavons says. Using open-pollinated seeds like the ones offered in his Bountiful Gardens Catalog helps preserve genetic diversity.

• Use the whole method.

Jeavons emphasizes that high yields come from using all Grow Biointensive components together.

So there we have a system which enables anybody to grow more vegetables on less land, as long as you do the whole thing .