Sticking With Intensive Methods

After giving it some thought, I've decided to keep going with the South Garden as well as the container garden.  Even though the landscaping cloth didn't block root invasion like it was supposed to do, the intensive method of removing all the soil from each bed after a crop and amending it in batches before returning it...that seems to really work well.

I had planned to get several crops before doing anything as drastic as overhauling the bed, but clearly that won't work.  I removed nearly all the soil and heaped it up by the driveway, and found out that the whole bed was a thatch of pine roots.  Most of it came out in chunks with some effort, and there were some impressively thick roots running through the bed.

I think this is what has caused all these crop failures.  It's the pine trees...they invade any rich soil they find and saturate it with toxic chemicals to prevent other plants from seriously competing with them for moisture and nutrients.  I remember one planting of peppers I made years ago at a different site northeast of the house...it was ludicrous...the plants reached a height of about three inches and then just stopped growing altogether.

That's why everything grows so much better in the containers...no pine roots.  What I'm planning, when I have enough compost to do it, is to mix all the soil from the bed with compost 1:1 and plant something in it that matures quickly so the pines can't essentially just steal all my compost for their own use.  Then after the crop is done, I'll remove all the soil again and heap it up alongside the driveway temporarily.  It's a laborious process, for sure, but from what I'm learning about intensive gardening and farming, it produces stellar results.  Intensive farming like this is practiced extensively in Asian countries. Certainly the tomatoes I planted that way were impressive...I got buckets and buckets of those things from just one small section of one planting bed.

My hope is that the pine roots won't have enough time to invade, especially if I go down into the subsoil and extract them all before replacing the topsoil in the bed.

The other solution would be to buy dozens of the large size nursery pots, put them on concrete blocks, and shovel my soil into those. Instead of a long mound of earth, I would have rows of blocks with big black pots lined up on them.  Somehow that solution doesn't appeal to me much.  But it would eliminate root invasion, wouldn't it?

Comments would be appreciated pro or con on this...I really haven't decided which would be best.  I tend to go with the more laborious and less expensive ways of doing things...and those pots and blocks would be a substantial expense for me.  When you're retired and living on Social Security, your choices are different.

One big advantage of pots...if I have to move, I could take the whole garden with me I suppose...assuming I don't move to New Zealand...LOL.