Microscale@Heggli
Growing vegetables at Heggli
After seeing and hearing about the concept of a market garden farm, we were inspired to try it on a small scale here at Heggli. We are giving it a go on an area of about 10x10 metres.
The most important thing we based the size and location of the beds on is that they should be easy to scale up and have good drainage.
The number 10 was chosen because it makes it easy to calculate how much seed and fertiliser we need. It is also easier if you want to scale up the production.
To lighten the workload we have decided to get a two-wheel tractor. This comes from experience, since we built 2 raised beds measuring 4x1.5 metres. It turned into a lot of digging and hard work when you have to double-dig the soil and crumble it up!
As the first piece of equipment for the tractor I have gone for a rotary plough to break up the soil and make new raised beds.
We decided to buy the Jansen MGT-420 mostly because of the price (the competitor was almost double), the extra equipment, and how difficult it was to actually get the thing ordered!
Lots of hopeless websites/shops with terrible design. The very worst are the ones that say “call for price”! That is exactly what you want when you are ordering from an “online shop”. The last criterion was that there were articles and videos about the product online.
So to sum up, price, availability, extra equipment and what was written about the product online is what we based the decision on.
One small extra thing that was decisive is that it actually has 15 hp. We have very hard soil so that was a plus. The others ranged from 8 to 11 hp in our price class.