Have you ever wondered how some people who wrk full time right alongside you have epic gardens with yields all summer long? How do they do that? They make it look effortless. Meanwhile you’re struggling to get things watered, to amend the soil, to prune, to harvest, to chop and drop, and it kind of steals the fun from you?

I was there! A lady up the hill grew 10,000 lbs of tomatoes on a 1/4 of an acre! What was she doing!? I actually have a video of what she was doing on my Facebook page and Youtube - I’ll link to it in the description - she was irrigating her gardens and orchards with her duck pond water - with duck manure! It fed those tomatoes superbly! I didn’t have the money, ducks, permission, or really mechanical know how to pull her system off on my land. Plus it was so dry where we were the debate over water was always always an issue. Perpetually pouring new water into a pond didn’t make sense for us. How could I get from point A to point B with no real money!

Well I figured it out and did it while still a public school teacher struggling to make ends meet - I scaled up to a full 2 acre garden managed with nothing but a knife, a shovel, manure, animals, straw, pallets, some fencing (in the early stages before I stopped using them), and animal feed - it took a progression, one you can see on Powers Permaculture Family Farm on Facebook if you’d like to go back in time and see my trial and error! It took some tinkering and some places are more stubborn than others but I changed our barren decomposed granite into rich deep dark chocolate colored loam in only a few seasons and in some places within a season...

Read the full transcript here: http://www.thepermaculturestudent.com/blog/2017/8/28/how-to-have-an-epic-garden-with-a-9-5-full-time-job