The best gardening video you will watch today

 

Eight minute run-time.

I agree with about 95% of this gardener's thinking. He is very deliberate in what he does. 

I diverge from his thinking where labor requirements spike (about the 7 minute mark). Labor and management will always be limiting factors and must be considered.

Crop rotation is a hot topic in some gardening circles. Skeptics ask how an mature forest of oak trees or tall-grass prairie can exist on the same plot of land for 300 years with no problems if yearly rotation is mandatory. Those who are for it claim that "agriculture" is an artificial, monoculture environment that fosters disease and pests and therefore rotating crops is mandatory. Pop some popcorn and grab a beverage, everybody has an opinion. 

This guy's take on rotation is that disease and pest cycles are not broken by TIME but by the number of generations of non-host crops. At the 5:20 mark of the video he talks about his hoop-houses. He rotates four classes of vegetables: Vining vegetables (squash, cucumbers, etc), Nightshades (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, etc), Leafy winter vegetables (lettuce, greens) and Root winter vegetables (beets, turnips, carrots).  Personally, I think he misses a trick by not splitting the houses in thirds and raising chickens as part of his rotation.

One neat trick that might slip by you is that he allows "weeds" as long as they are edible and are short enough that they don't compete with his primary crop. Portulaca oleracea, Stellaria media, Fragaria, Allium tuberosum, Fagopyrum esculentum and Physalis pruinosa are just some of the options available. Weeds happen, just like feces. Might as well guide and direct them so benefit can be gaind.

Very odd: A video by a Brit of a Russian/Pole farming in Japan. We live in an interesting world.