"Ok lady, put the camera down and hand over the blackberries."
Something Jenny at My life in Flip Flops said about my last post got me thinking. She said a garden redesign sounds like a lot of work. It's funny but compared to how much I would have to do if the garden stayed as it is, the redeisgn is actually less work because it is based on permaculture techniques!
In permaculture, everything in the garden has multiple purposes to conserve energy - including human energy tending to it - and you don't fight nature, you work with it and use it constructively. For example, I've spent five years battling with the dandelions, weeds and brambles at the bottom of the garden. After a couple of months of the chickens being on there and scratching around, I no longer have a problem. And the chickens provide me with eggs, manure for the garden, and kill off pests at the same time. I didn't consciously plan that - I just wanted the chickens contained so they stopped wrecking the garden and it seemed the most appropriate place. The penny only dropped a week ago about what had been achieved.
For a really lovely introduction to permaculture with some great illustrations, have a look at this by Graham Burnett:
http://www.spiralseed.co.uk/permapdf/handout.pdf
As I've decided to go for a no-dig garden where possible, all the beds I plan on overhauling will have a layer of composted manured chicken straw and bedding, followed layers of wet cardboard, newspaper and wood chip, then compsost and soil plus a top layer of mulch, either hay or straw.I'm going to buy in 100 extra soil worms for each bed and they are going to do the digging work for me, burrowing through all the layers and dragging it all down to begin changing the substructure of the bed. Compared to what I would normally do (double digging, manuring etc) this will be a doddle! The hardest part will be finding the cardboard, although a trip to Wyevales this morning netted me enough for half of one bed.
Yesterday I dug out the existing flowers and weeds in the bed nearest the patio.
The soil is poor with no organic substructure to it so all the plants were weak and had some kind of disease. Even the weeds were not doing well and all it took was a quick yank and everything came up. All I left behind was the buddleja which looks wonderful simply by virtue of its enormous tap root. As a treat, I let the chickens loose on there for the day to clear the site of pests and rake it over for me.
A couple of years ago we were given an old pond and I put that in yesterday to provide extra water down this end of the garden for the wildlife. The hedgehogs use the path past the bed to get round the house to the street and apart from the saucerfuls that we put out, they have no other real water source. The pond has stepped levels at one end so if one of them accidently falls in it can get out quite easily. I'll be adding some stone round the edges with crevices so newts and frogs can hide.
My intention is that this bed will be a herb spiral and salad crops, including cherry tomatoes, as they are shallow rooting. I don't yet know how the buddleja will affect the bed's water supply so until I do I don't want to plant anything deep rooting. I suspect I will need to think up a way of keeping this bed permanently irrigated using water from the roof of the conservatory about 10 feet to the left of it.
My hope is that I get three of the beds nearest the house done by Christmas ready for spring planting, and that the ground closest the rose arbour and pergola can be prepared in a similar way for growing climbing beans.
The view from the end of the path with the rose arch.
The pergola with a clematis dying of wilt. That will come out ready for climbing beans.
Martin putting the roof on the workshop.
I won't tell you what I'm thinking of doing to the outside of the workshop, but it involves growing food vertically and Martin should be very afraid.