Hide a garden by placing it where nobody passes or looks from: behind a ridge, hedge or dense growth, away from trails, roads and water crossings, and out of sight of high ground. Check each candidate on foot from the approaches an outsider would use and in the season you plant and harvest, because a leafy screen that hides a summer crop is bare in winter and a plot seen once is known.
Part of Defensive Agriculture
Hidden garden placement is the choice of a plot’s location by sight lines, approaches and terrain so that outsiders are unlikely to see or come upon it.
Sight Lines Come Before Soil
The parent article lists forest clearings, south-facing slopes hidden by terrain, abandoned lot corners and places behind dense vegetation as hiding places. All of them work only if the plot cannot be seen from where people go. List the places people walk, ride, camp, drink and look from, and rule out any site visible from them.
- Trails, roads and rivers. Anyone passing sees what they can see. Keep the plot out of their line.
- High ground. A plot hidden from the trail may lie open to a hillside or a tall building. Check from above.
- Water crossings and gathering points. People pause there and look around.
- Edges. A field edge, a fence line or a woodland boundary draws the eye and the foot; a plot well inside a woodland, or behind a rise, is better.
- Night. Light is a signature. The camouflage article in this corpus notes a single candle is visible at night from about 1.5 km; do not work at a hidden plot by lamp. See Camouflage and Concealment.
Method: Test A Candidate Site
Step 1: List candidate sites within walking range of the base; see Satellite Garden Sites for water, sun and soil.
Step 2: Walk the approaches. Walk toward the site along every route an outsider would take: the road, the trail, the stream. At intervals, stop and look at where the plot would be. If you can see it, so can they.
Step 3: Look from high ground. Climb the nearest rise or building and look down. A garden that is invisible from the ground may stand out from above, as a patch of different colour and texture.
Step 4: Repeat in the right season. Return in the season you will plant and the season you will harvest. Deciduous leaves hide a summer plot and fall; evergreen cover does not.
Step 5: Have someone else try. Ask a person who does not know the location to walk the route and say what they can see. People who know a place cannot easily unsee it.
Step 6: Plan the approach path. Choose a way to the plot over hard ground, rock or logs, and vary it; see Reducing Agricultural Signatures.
Terrain That Helps, And Terrain That Hurts
- Helps: a hollow behind a rise, a plot ringed by dense shrub, ground on the far side of a stream or a bog from the trail, the lee of an old wall.
- Hurts: a hollow that collects cold air at night and loses crops to frost (see Cold Air Drainage & Frost Pockets), a stream bank that floods, a site with no sun, a plot so remote it cannot be reached when needed.
Common Mistakes
- Judging from inside. You know where it is. Check as a stranger.
- Checking only in summer. The screen may be bare in winter.
- Forgetting high ground. The plot is seen from above.
- Using a lamp. Light travels.
- Telling nobody. An injured gardener may not be found.
A hidden plot is also hidden from rescuers
If you fall, are cut, or meet a wild animal at a plot nobody knows about, no one will come. Tell at least one other person where each plot is, how to reach it, and when you will be back. Do not dig pits or set hazards around a plot to deter visitors: hidden hazards injure your own people, children and livestock, and cannot deter anyone who has not seen them.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Camouflaged Crop Selection — choosing crops that suit a hidden plot
- Combine with: Reducing Agricultural Signatures — removing the signs that remain