Farming on Slope
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Curtis Stone runs a commercial urban farm called Green City Acres out of Kelowna, BC, Canada. His mission is to show others how they can grow a lot of food on small plots of land and make a living from it. Using DIY and simple infrastructure, one can earn a significant living from their own back yard or someone else’s.
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That apple pen is awesome can only imagine what your gonna illustrate in your videos. I think a video to explain where you go and do on your farm over a overview of your farm would be a great way to show off your pen.
My market garden used to be on various 5-15 degree slopes. With 18" walkways we were able to rotary plow just the underside of each bed up from the pathway to make level beds. Mini terracing basically, with beds running just slightly off contour for a bit of drainage. Worked well for us, especially since it was borrowed land which we couldn’t permanently terrace.
What about that bomb that exploded in the passive solar green-house?
Your slope is a plain for us…haha… Binge watching your videos every other day… Love from the Himalayas
This year we had a 25 veggie boxes CSA in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and our big garden (1500 sq meters, long and narrow) was on a slope so we marked the ends of the approx. 16 meter long beds with a bunyip water level to be on contour. We ended up we slightly diagonal beds that held rain water quite well and 3 or 4 bumper crops triangles where the angle of the slope changed. Drip lines, mulching, carterpilar tunnels, compost teas, all the works.
Very thought provoking! It is worth mentioning that the terrace areas do not need to be cut so deeply, as the rear half will fill the front half for half the digging and lower retaining walls.
Everything’s a slope in the north of England and we do fine
Nice! Thanks!
Hi Curtis
I want to do plantation (vegetables)
On a slope
Do you think it that a good thing to cut the slope for bed raising
Please I need your advice
If you run your beds down the slope you got walkways in between yet if you run em across the slope you need to add space for a walkway. This to me is important.
Contour farming is the best
THANK YOU for this!! I screwed up in putting in my first plot and it got destroyed in high rain levels this year and washed out. Re-do this winter but you have confirmed my plan. Thx again!
I was thinking of leveling the ground with straw or hey bales . I hate that slope.
Curtis, the idea of building substantial infrastructure like retaining walls is a very expensive option, and one that is basically permanent. It also introduces potential access problems to beds to work them and harvest product.
The thought of gardening on slopes even of 25 degree is more than challenging. Those sort of slopes would need serious consideration of overland water run off or serious erosion of beds will happen. It can happen on much lower gradients with high rainfall.
Any site needs to have an analysis to determine natural water flows and how to manage those water resources while minimising the negatives like erosion and permanent costly infrastructure.
There are other factors to consider with terracing or raised beds. Curtis mentioned several ie: rainfall, slope, erosion. Others are how well your soil handles water or soil type, ph level, to name a couple. I’ve found that the more you know about your soil the better your decisions will be regarding management. Curtis’ book touches on that really well. in Edmonton I’ve used both raised and level beds. In Saskatchewan where I am currently raised beds will not work here, the soil has a heavy clay content which keeps any rainfall near the surface for plants to use. In Manitoba where I started, the soil drained so well that you needed large amounts of organic matter to keep the moisture where the plant root could access it.
In a cold climate, many time you farm off contour so you can get rid of cold air pockets.
you can find ideas in a pdf called "Soil Conservation Techniques for Hillside Farms" on archive.org (https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED288044). on my 30% (18°) slope, i started with one bed wide mini terraces which i’m now merging two by two.
Using a GIS software is very helpful for this
Your slope is a plain for us…haha… Binge watching your videos every other day… Love from the Himalayas
This was really helpful. I live in PR and I’m starting my veggie garden BUT our property have different slopes with different degrees. And it rains a lot where I live. Just last night I was thinking 🤔 How do I place the garden? Horizontal or vertical? Thanks to this video I know what to do now. I’ll have a contour (horizontal) one on the slope that is steeper and a vertical on the less steeper. Thanks again!
Oh, hey! I asked about this during a Live Q&A with you last year. Woot! Love this.
I have a couple of acres with gradual slope toward a seasonal creek/wash in Northeast Arizona. I am thinking it’s ideal for some terracing.
This was perfect. I’m on a 15 degree slope. Last year I ran my beds down the slope and had irrigation problems. I’m definitely running the beds along the slope this year and maybe level up with a raised bed or two at the bottom
I have a trick for getting started in a hurry on a steep slope. I use my hoe and pull down material to make a narrow terrace, about 5 feet wide. Then I line up cardboard boxes along the crease and fill them with topsoil and compost. Easier than sifting through rocky, degraded soil. That gets me ready for planting and seeding quicker. When I have the time I can drive in stakes and build wood retainer walls. It took me a bit of time to get comfortable working on a slope but it is actually a great exercise in balance. I have to be conscious of where I place my body at all times. The biggest issue on slope is irrigation. Low feeding plants work best.
You call that a slope !? Ha ! Try growing coffee on 45 degree slopes across 500ft elevation
I spent some time thinking of the key line application in the past and I personally think the broad fork utilizes that pattern or concept best for intensive market gardening. My understanding of key line is that it is a bigger landscape design concept. The key line plow is something used on broader acreage and for perennial pasture. The goal is capturing water and expanding root zone. Deep worked soils like John Jeavons double dug beds (way too much work on scale) or the broad fork minimize run off and allow for deeper roots in a similar way to the key line plow. I’m taking on a new plot next year with a decent slope and going to mostly use it for the long season steady field crops like kale, Swiss chard, and summer squash, as well as garlic and strawberries.
Thank you for your context. Look up VETIVER species . It’s a grass that bills a root retaining wall , the grass is harvest for good ground cover . It makes terracing productive and un expensive
my old uncle use to say it was easier to work across the slope than up and down it, the work platform was raised, the walkway was level, better for the ankles, knee’s, hips & back.
Oh… I was hoping it was a bigger slope. My parents have a farm and I am educating myself about it
Also, I’m at this video researching my options. My back yard garden is on a slope. It was a lawn, I did the no dig thing, covered it with cardboard, and made beds at 4-8 inches of hand mixed soil made of compost, commercial topsoil, sphagnum moss, biochar and other amendments. My soil is light and fluffy. It is beautiful, it does not compact, it is awesome. BUT. My backyard is SOLID clay. I hoped the biological activity, humic acid, etc. would break the clay down. Nope. All my roots grew down to the clay layer and took a hard 90 degree turn. Nothing can penetrate the clay.
And here is the problem – I’m in a high desert growing environment, at a mile high, and every day of official summer is over 100 degrees here. So, I had to irrigate heavily. I had some various tomato varieties in containers, and no hyperbole, I had to hand water, filling the top of the pot with water and watering until there was water at the bottom of the pot… I had to do this 4 (FOUR, yes FOUR) times a day to prevent my tomato leaves from curling up and withering. I say that to give an idea of the amount of heat and lack of humidity I have to deal with.
So, I had to heavily irrigate my beds. But the problem is, I’d water, the water would filter down through my nice fluffy soil, hit the clay layer below, and just run down the slope, right out of the garden.
So, that is why I’m on this vid, trying to figure out how to retain water in my beds, and prevent subsurface runoff.
I believe I need to break the clay and mix it with my beautiful soil, and hopefully the irrigated water will sink deeper into my beds. My beds would act as a cistern, holding irrigated water, preventing it from flowing down hill, under my lower beds.
I’ve excavated, by hand, one row, just to understand the preexisting clay layer below my beds. I used a shovel, and it was back breaking work, as the clay layer isn’t actually all clay, it is actually mostly stone. It is a highly dense clay matrix containing a range of gravel sizes from pea up to rocks that are too large to be called gravel, then getting larger from those rock sizes all the way up to honeydew sized stones. The soil is more akin to concrete, in that it is an extremely dense binder matrix (cement) with gravel, rocks and stone glued into place. I tried to use a shovel, but I couldn’t penetrate even one 1/4 inch into the ground. The steel blade of the shovel hits gravel or rock, and the clay matrix is so dense and solid, it is like trying to dig in hardened concrete. It’s just impossible. So, I used a pickax, and that was a process of breaking the "clay" soil/concrete into smaller pieces then shoveling those broken pieces out onto tarps I laid down on the next lower bed. I managed to get about a foot down, all the length of the bed. And I’ve learned a few things.
First, of all the clay "soil" that I removed, at least 50% of the volume is made of rock.
Second, I’ve tried to remove the gravel, rock and stone by screening the removed clay "soil" but it is extremely difficult, as the chunks of actual clay are indistinguishable from gravel, and they are nearly as hard. I’ve managed to separate out one test wheelbarrow of "soil" and filled a 5 gallon bucket with rocks and gravel. But in looking at the wheelbarrow, it is still filled with gravel small enough to fit through my 3/4 inch chicken wire screen. So, I don’t even know if it is worthwhile to try to screen out all the "soil" I removed from this trench/row. If I were to do this, it would take me, minimum a full week, but likely more to screen this one twenty foot row, and that is just the screening, that doesn’t include the excavation time with pickax and shovel, and it doesn’t include the time spent replacing the actual clay soil and mixing with my fluffy soil and amendments. I’ve got starts that need to go in the ground a week or more ago… I just don’t know what I’m going to do at this point. I’m between a rock and a hard place, literally, and I’ve got very literal leverage, meaning physical or monetary resources.
Third, it has snowed and alternately rained since I excavated this test row/trench. The trench holds water as well as a concrete cistern would. The water level has not dropped a 1/4 inch in a week, and I’m sure the only water to leave the trench has been through evaporation.
So, I’m certain that my rows could act as clay cisterns to hold irrigation water, if I could fill the rows with loose fluffy soil. But I do not have close to the financial resources to fill the rows with that much good soil. As it was, just building the 4-8 inches of soil last year was way, way, way too expensive. Like it would take twenty years of produce from this garden to even justify the expense on the soil I have made.
So, I think I’m going to try to fill this one excavated row with as fluffy soil as I can, so it will act as a catch for irrigation water for the row above it, and itself. The row above, I’m just going to try to turn the my good soil with about 6 inches of the clay "soil" below, and hopefully integrate the clay into my perfect soil. I’m hoping to break up maybe 6 inches of the clay layer into the about 6 inches of perfect soil that I have built. That should give me a little more water retention in the highest row, and in the lower rows. It was brutal watching expensive water run right out from under the garden, carrying all of the nutrients and amendments I’d built into my soil.
AND, I managed to scavenge a load of 12 foot 2×8’s, at least $250+ worth in today’s (purposely) rapidly inflating economy. I was going to use the 2×8’s on the down hill side of my beds in an attempt to seal off the beds, the 2×8’s acting as damn walls, and minimize water run off. But I don’t know how to safely treat the wood so it doesn’t just rot, as it will be between my wood chip walkways that retain moisture very well, and my soil. I believe the 2×8’s would rot quickly from the moisture. I’d use linseed oil to seal the wood, but it appears that all affordable linseed oil, so oil that is cold pressed, and doesn’t include heavy metals and drying agents is far to expensive to do all the linear feet I’d need to do. So, I don’t think I can afford the linseed oil needed to seal the wood, and I can’t afford to be growing my families food in soil that is potentially leaching out heavy metals from the wood sealer.
So now I’m thinking of installing the 2×8’s, letting the clay set around them, then pulling them out, and pouring concrete into the 2×8 void. I’m thinking that this concrete form would act as a retaining wall, for the soil of my beds and for the irrigation water. But I don’t know the cost, or the actual impact these poured concrete retaining walls would have. I think it would be expensive, and very labor intensive, and my body is broken already. I don’t know if I can even garden this season! Also, I don’t know if this would negatively impact the property value of this home, having this semi-terraced back yard. I’m sure most buyers would rather just have a lawn… even though the lawn is too small to really be used for any family purpose…
Argh. If anyone has experience with gardening or farming on concrete like clay soil, and or on a grade (that isn’t really all that steep, maybe 6 or 7%… I should measure it, maybe more), I’d appreciate it greatly. But who has time to read all this? Who has time to write it all?
Thanks for the great video! I find it hard to visualize slopes on a flat screen and the way you drew lines over the image really helped me see what you were talking about.
Buying 20 acres on a mountain slope. I’d like to do market gardening and growing fruit trees while giving us some privacy from the neighbors and roadway.
a market garden I worked on was on a slope, maybe around 10 degrees, and there is more energy expended walking around and moving wheel barrows etc. then a flat site. I suppose putting compost heap at top of slope would help.
One way that I’ve done paths in the past was to dig them down about 10" and then do sheet composting in them with a layer of wood chips on the top. It was a bunch of work since it was all done by hand but I sure loved it! No weeds at all in the paths and the sheet composting help create incredible amounts of worms in the beds. It only works well though if one is doing no-till. Planning to do it in our greenhouses for this next year.
Good day Sir, I just wanna ask an advice coming from you. Is it possible to plant Pomelo trees on 40 degree slope area. thanks for sharing your ideas.
Informative, very powerful
Probably the wrong wood chips and not piled high enough. Needs reapplying too often and can be costly, as worms eat the chips. Need playground wood chips which contain no greens leafs and branches or bark also chips to a perfect size. also its easy to walk on and it’s slower to compost. Cedar chips take longer to break down but cost more.
why not have a ground cover between paths(grass)?
you can walk on it
it would absorb water
protect the soil from splashing soil
no need to buy mulch
stop soil erosion
and prevent weeds
cons need to cut it
I’ve got three west facing acres on a 15 % slope outside Austin Texas where it’s dry, hot and usually drought ridden. I have just enough rainwater for our farmhouse so I’m hoping to utilize the runoff from the slope which is substantial. I don’t want to dig a well and drop 40k and they might not even hit water but I’d still have to pay the driller. My only alternative would be hydroponics. Do you think it’s better for my land to be west facing slopes than south due to the scorching Texas sun? This video was just what I needed as I was so unsure about how to position my beds. I’d like to see more regarding this subject. I’m planting food for just my family and a commercial cut flower farm for the booming wedding venues in my area. Thanks Curtis
Sir I’m from nepal how to use hilly areas for farming , there is no water? Electricityi is also not possible.
I have experimented with great results the trenched bed method. I.E. instead of raising beds, we trenched between the beds connecting all of my trenches as to drain excess rainfall, as my climate dictates i use these trenches with small dams installed to irrigate, preventing soil splash from my sprinkler setup. They hold runoff in the dryer months. And the water reflects sunlight that would be waisted on the walkways. I.D.K. just my experience.
You have alot of sprayers behind you. What do use those for?
Curtis, thank you for making a video to discuss about farming on slopes. I am actually planning on starting a market garden. However, my property has uneven, deep south-facing slopes. I have considered doing my 30" beds downhill but I live in Central New York. I do not want to be sliding downhill on the walking paths in-between the beds when it is wet. So I am seriously considering terracing the slopes like you drew out in this video. A hoop house would be on the top of the slope where it’s flat and other plots of beds would be on terraces below the hoop house. In-between each terrace, I am thinking about some sort of French drain or key line to help move and redirect the excess water when it rains a lot in spring, to a pond for watering. This video helped me get further in the thinking process of planning a market garden on slopes. Thank you again!!
My property is sloped and I’m currently in the presses of planning out the lay of market garden beds. On one hand we do get a bit of rain, so it might be a good idea to have them running down the slope. On the other hand, most of it is in a North/south position so I’m worried about shading. This gave me something to think about. Thanks!
Pots? Choose bushy plants with deep roots? Perennials?
LOVE the Thomas Sowell shirt!
My walkways are made with small sized fresh chipped maple. After one season the wood chips look like soil already. There are still chips, but they are in a matrix of "soil" which is decayed wood chips. I have a bad weed problem with morning glory in my garden. BUT, my walkways are almost totally weed free. And by almost, I mean there have been maybe 5 weeds that managed to get cotyledons out throughout the whole season last year, and through this spring so far. My walkways are about 4 – 6 inches of fresh chipped, small sized maple wood chips, and essentially weed free, in a problematic morning glory infested garden. FWIW
Thank you Curtis! Super informative. Definitely makes me feel more comfortable with what I can do with my property 🙂
So I purchased a little over 2 acres of raw land fully wooded in East Texas Zone 8a. Before I do any work on the land I plan on spending 5 years properly designing and building the land for a home stead but also a micro farm using a full 1/2 acre which is on a slope. While there are several resources out there can you guide me into one that would talk about the things I need to know when it comes to develop raw land that is wooded and on a slope?
There are so many directions and stuff out there and I plan on studying but I also need to start clearing the land and build a couple of buildings. But I want to make sure I am doing it in the right spot and also clear what I need to clear. Thanks for any suggestions!
Hi Curtis. I farm on 15-20° slope and I use to mulch a lot against erosion and fall of the ph. Plus I use a very old American machine called Gravely that turns the soil and throw it uphill… It’s a great machine, if you want I send you video. Ciao
7:35 Ffs man its NOT 1/4 acre. Göz var nizam var amk.