As a young professional with a houseful of kids and a professional husband who grew up, as I did, on a farm with a large home garden, I began to look for an easier way to produce healthy, good tasting vegetables in the high, dry climate of Albuquerque.
We had hard packed decomposed granite with almost no fertility and a limited area in our urban yard.
What I came up with was the compost filled, sunken, biointensive bed.
We laid out our beds in the area between the side wall and the street in the first house we lived in, and in the back yard of a later house.
First we dug an eighteen inch deep, four by eight foot hole where we wanted a bed.
The earth dug from that bed was used to make walkways between beds.
Over the winter we filled the bed with all the compost material our kitchen produced.
We were careful not to include meat, bones, fatty or oily material, fish or poultry.
We did not want to attract dogs, coyotes or other animals.
I did put my eggshells inn the compost, although many desert dwellers with highly calcareous soils do not.
At the end of the winter we dug a second bed and covered the compost in the first one with the soil from that bed, leaving the surface of the soil a few inches below the level of the path.
The reason for the sunken bed was so that the water from the drenching fifteen minute rains we occasionally get, or the water from the hose end soaker attachment, would stay in the bed rather than run off as it would on a mounded raised bed.
Our goal was to preserve every bit of water we possibly could.
The moisture and the alkalinity of the soil caused very rapid breakdown of the organic matter and we soon had a rich layer of compost under our layer of desert soil.
This is where I planted my first crops.
That summer we filled another two beds with kitchen scraps, lawn clipping (do not use Bermuda grass clippings) and weeds.
It is important to pull the weeds before they go to seed to avoid spreading weeds from one place to another.
We continued digging, filling with compost and covering until we had the fourteen beds we had originally laid out with neat, dry paths between them.
In these beds we used a biointensive planting system, in which the plants were put in so that they touched each other and completely covered and shaded the soil when they were mature.
To determine the proper spacing for plants in a biointensive system look at the seed packet to determine the "in-row" spacing for that plant, then plant in a diamond pattern with each plant that distance from the other nearest plants.
We were careful to stay on the paths when planting, weeding and harvesting to keep from compacting the soil in the bed.
We always kept a couple of beds unplanted, one that had been dug out and was in the process of being filled with compost material and another that would be the next bed to be dug and filled.
Each time we dug or filled a bed we reshaped the edges of the bed and made sure the path between it and other beds was solid.
Over time the paths became hard packed and solid even in the wettest weather and the beds were filled with rich, loose earth that retained water well and grew large, healthy crops.
Rotating the compost beds also encouraged us to rotate the crops, although since the soil was mixed from one bed to another and we did not always do them in the same order our crop rotation was probably irrelevant.