This week we visited one of URI’s satellite locations, the College of the Environment and Life Sciences East Farm Horticultural Facility in Kingston. RI. URI Master Gardener President, Rudy Hempe, spoke to us about purpose of the newly established Demonstration Gardens at East Farm and some of the gardening techniques being evaluated this summer.

According to Hempe, URI’s East Farm is a wonderful resource - a jewel of farmland and open space nestled in the heart of South Kingstown, just a short distance from main campus. The URI Master Gardeners saw East Farm as the ideal location for new demonstration gardens. The farm is easily accessible to volunteers and the public and will allow the URI Master Gardeners to expand their educational efforts, particularly in the area of vegetable gardening.

In the summer of 2003, the URI Master Gardeners began installation of a large vegetable garden (over 5,000 square feet). The garden will showcase methods of preparing planting areas as well as allowing the gardeners to evaluate vegetable varieties and test environmentally sound methods of managing insects and diseases. Best of all, all of the food produced from the vegetable garden will be donated to the Rhode Island Food Bank.

The URI Master Gardeners began the project by putting up a fence to keep out deer, woodchucks and rabbits. One portion of the fence is plastic, 8 feet high and designed to foil high-jumping deer. To keep out woodchucks and rabbits, a second fence made of vinyl-coated metal surrounds the garden to a height of four feet. Because woodchucks are excellent diggers, this fence is buried one foot deep and extends one foot to the outside, in the shape of an ‘L’.

Inside the garden area, the URI Master Gardeners have prepared planting beds using two dramatically different methods: ‘no till’ and ‘double dug’. Over the next several years, the team will monitor and evaluate the productivity of each approach.

In ‘no-till’ garden beds, the soil is left undisturbed and covered with a layer of organic mulch. To plant, you slice through the mulch layer, leaving everything but the planting hole intact. The approach offers many benefits, not the least of which is a savings in upfront labor - no need to dig and turn the soil! In the long run, the no-till method preserves soil structure, protects soil organisms and conserves organic matter in the soil.

In the no-till beds, the soil is held together and made porous by all the organisms living in it. As long as you don't walk on the beds, the soil will remain light and airy.

The goal of 'double dug' beds is also to create light and airy soil. This is accomplished by digging deeply so that the soil is fluffy to a depth of two feet. It is hard work and it's purported to take a full year before the bed becomes highly productive. The benefits include fantastic root growth, high yield/square foot and minimal maintenance (the dense plant growth prohibits weeds).

The URI Master Gardeners have also installed a weather station, and cleaned and restored an old farmhouse on the property. This farmhouse will be used as a meeting place for educational classes and is known as the URI Master Gardener Field House. The lawn area around the Field House will be planted with different varieties of grass seed so that visitors can see the advantages or disadvantages of each variety.