"Many a pioneers has built a homestead and planted crops and watched his livestock and family wither away until generally after 5 years, broke and broken, they leavee."

The same thing can be said about the Ozarks, but there's been a lot learned since those days....

Raised bed gardening, greenhouses, low tunnel greenhouses, hybrid plants, soil enrichment, fertilizers, contour farming, terraced hillside farming, and much more.

First, a veggie garden is a lot different than a crop farm. There are still not many crop farms here in the Ozark Mountains, but there are a lot of livestock farmers and a lot of veggie gardens and orchards. I am surrounded by beef cattle and chicken farms. Those farms wouldn't have survived here even 80 years ago, but they thrive here now. This is a direct result of refrigerated transportation by trucks and trains.

But a veggie garden can be grown almost anywhere now. As in my case, it's taken a few years of amending the native soil in raised beds, some fencing, some weather and pest protection, and consistent watering.

In my own garden I've been trying a method that's added a small new twist to raised beds, contours, and terraced hillsides. I call it a "Swale Garden". Basically, I've dug a trench that runs along the contour of the hillside and mounded the soil from the trench on top of the soil below the trench to create a mound (or raised bed). I fill the trench with leaves and other organic matter (shredded weeds, wood chips grass clippings, et al).

When it rains, instead of the water washing off topsoil into the creek at the bottom of the hillside and down into the lake below that, the water is trapped in the trenches and absorbed by the leaves. What isn't asborbed by capillary action from the leaves into the mounds is slowly soaked up by the ground below. The leaves work as a mulch to keep weeds down between the raised beds, and they turn into a rich compost which is used to amend the soil in the beds.

I was inspired to try this method by proponents of raised bed gardening, the Machu Picchu terraced gardens, and an Australian cattle rancher who created swales on his grazing land to improve the amount of forage available.

When you add to that good fencing, bug nets, low tunnel greenhouses, successive plantings and crop rotation, you have a pretty good shot at keeping a high production crop garden going almost all year long, just about anywhere you might live.

Using these advantages over the pioneers, and depending on the size of your garden, after reducing your grocery bill and improving your table fare you can easily grow enough to sell to supplement or replace your income. You may not be living like Donald Trump, but after all things considered, you may be living better.

Here's some pics of our garden:

This shows another shot at a low tunnel greenhouse. I'm using bamboo sticks with old garden hose to make the hoops. It's not pretty, but it works...


This shows the mounds and swales. The swales are filled with mulch, so you can't see their depth...


This shows how the mulch in the swales retain moisture...


These are for Jim. This shows our chicken coop from the outside...


And this shows the inside with the nest boxes, roosts, feed pan, water trough, and of course, the babies...