An Organoponico is a highly structured and orderly environment for the production of highly nutritious vegetable crops.
An OP [Organoponico] is based around concrete-sided raised garden beds that usually contain customised or highly modified soils. The appearance of these beds is aesthetic as the concrete walls are tapered and moulded, with all sharp edges removed.
An OP is a semi-”cloister” type of garden with respect to the environment being highly regulated and of a rectilinear nature. Also the garden may be enclosed in a courtyard or surrounded by low-level intimate shelterbelts or walls.
An OP is very user-friendly, with wide open pathways mulched with course organic materials and finely crushed rock, and it is very up-close and personal, with one foot high, 1.4 metre wide garden beds slightly mounded in the middle, that are flanked by wide moulded concrete walls which are very comfortable to sit and work on.
An OP is easy care and low maintenance due to the no-dig and permanent mulch methods practised as much as possible [ but not exclusively since all methods have their advantages and disadvantages ]. Another easy care method is fertigation which is applied by laying lines of drip tape on the beds and then pulsing water and nutrients through the lines by gravity feeding from elevated tanks or drums.
Also very cheap and effective cloche frames can be made from rods of reinforcing iron and 13mm alkathene pipe so that crops can be covered with polythene, shadecloth or birdnetting which reduces problems with weather and pests.
That the OP beds require very little digging and weeding, is because they are one foot high which makes them free draining, and also easy to work on and keep tidy. The other reason is the growing media has been customised by blending free draining, weed free materials such as crusher dust, bedding scoria, pap 7, sawdust, clean compost etc. The recipe is roughly 30% finely ground rocky material, 30% organic matter and 30% soil, preferably clay loam.
The highly mineralised nature of this growing media, plus the high humus content, mimics the composition of the earth`s soil during a much earlier evolutionary epochs and I have coined the term ” Jurrassic Soil ” to describe this level of soil fertility.
On top of this, substantial additions of Biochar will be added later as it becomes available. Biochar is finely ground wood charcoal that has been formed under low temperatures in a Charcoal kiln. The remarkable properties of Biochar have been only recently discovered through analysing the phenomenally fertile soils found in the Amazon Basin that are known as Terra Preta.
Thus the growing media that fills the OP beds creates an amazing fertility which supports supernutritious vegetables and all this could be called ” Terra Preta Jurassic Soil Fertility ” In fact because the height and volume of these “beds” makes them look more like “banks” and due to their great nutrient storage capacity from the high humus and clay content, I prefer to think of them as being “Banks of Fertility”.
In summary an Organoponico is a sheltered, total control, productive garden which is perfect for everyone from children to the elderly, and the sick and the lazy, so everybody can farm !!!