![]() ![]() Try lining them with a stone or rock border, which looks attractive while reducing erosion and retaining moisture. Garden berms built along the contour can hold vegetables, perennial fruits, or other crops. Using the Land’s Topography in the Home Garden Let’s take a look at how contour gardening can be used on a small scale. This technique of farming the contour lines can be used for both annual and perennial crops.įor gardeners with less-than-ideal areas, the idea of contour farming has been adapted to the backyard scale. In this way, water and nutrients can more easily infiltrate the soil, minimizing irrigation and fertilization needs. When planted along the natural curve of the land, gullies and soil erosion are reduced. An inappropriate use of farming techniques the world over has caused an increase in soil erosion and an astounding loss of soil fertility.Ĭontour farming is a cultivation technique that, when used on gently sloping lands, can mitigate erosion and maximize the absorption of rain and nutrients before they rush down the slope.įor this technique, crops are planted across a slope following the natural elevation contour lines, rather than up and down the hill. Unfortunately, growing practices like tilling-which were appropriate on flat lands-have been transferred to the slopes. ![]() As population densities increase around the world, however, global agriculture is being pushed from the flat prairie lands to less-than-ideal, sloping terrain. Gravity, after all, can turn a lovely hillside into a grueling challenge. ![]() The Roots of Contour Gardening: Contour FarmingĪs long as agriculture has been around, farming flat land has been the ideal landscape. Here’s what contour gardening is and how you can pull it off. It’s a popular tool in permaculture gardens. Here are both stages of my pepper plant sketch.Contour gardening is a way to use the land’s contours to reduce irrigation and erosion, and maximize nutrients for abundant harvest yields. Maybe it’s because I’m too impatient to do a good job with watercolor. This may be because I love pen lines so much. At this point I almost always choose one of the two ‘shading’ options but when I’m done I often wish I’d left the sketch as the contour. Sometimes I consider the third option of leaving it just as it is – a contour drawing. Do I add a bunch of cross-hatching or do I add watercolor. When I finish with the ink contour a decision must be made. There’s considerable cross-checking between the curve I’m drawing and those I’ve already drawn, locating my position by comparing angles and distances constantly. As I draw them they become abstracts I’m no longer drawing a plant, but rather a whole bunch of curves relative to one another. ![]() I find drawing plants to be a challenge as it’s easy to get lost in the overlapping contours of the leaves. The weather was wonderful and I sat on our deck, got some sun, and communed with my pepper plant. In my last post I mentioned that I had to cancel a local sketching adventure because my knees weren’t cooperating and I suggested that I might sketch a pepper plant that I’d bought. ![]()
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