We grow what we like to eat, and apparently what the goats like too! Occasionally they have broken free and, uninvited, browsed the garden's offerings - leaving behind a lot of destruction. So if you want both goats and a garden, you will need to be sure to keep the two well separated through good fencing.

In the fall, we usually turn the bucks loose to clear out all the old plants before we prepare the beds for winter. So far, we have not grown winter crops but rather let the beds go dormant under a cover crop of rye grass. When and if we ever do decide to grow winter crops, then we'll have to change our "clearing" method. At left is a layout of our garden beds and what we planted in 1999. We use the "French Intensive Biodynamic" approach to gardening, which is basically:

--a raised, double-dug bed gardening method focusing on heavy organic remediation of the soils via compost in particular,

--an IPM (integrated pest management) format,

--use of companion plants (plants that don't conflict with each other's growth),

--annual rotation of crops,

--and a closer planting of crop plants and seed than is recommended for the older row-style format gardening.

For example, we space out tomato plants (determinate) at a 2.5 ft distance from one another - we had a total of 12 plants in a bed 16 ft x 4 ft. The "Better Boys" easily reach 8 feet tall or more by early summer, and we easily havest full  3-gallon buckets of Porter and Cherry tomatos every other day. This method produces more produce per square foot than other traditional planting methods. Plus, it virtually eliminates the need to weed as the plants are much closer to one another.