Our garden

Cow destruction

Version 5.0

After we got back from our 2016 holiday in New Zealand, we found that the land had been invaded by cows and they had completely destroyed our vege patch! So we took the opportunity to restarted a new one (version 5.0!) on the side of the hill in the field where there's much more sun. This one is much more organised and is divided into nine different beds each sign-posted with a letter so we can document what we do in each bed and when. This way we can experiment with different methodologies to see what best suits our situation here.

There are two lines on the northern fence side of the path and the original ones along the southern side of the path, the original ones either use just a plain letter such as G or can have the subscript of 1, e.g. G₁. If we create further lines more southward they'll have sibscripts of 2,3,4 etc the more south they go. The line on the northern (fence) side of the path have the subscript of zero, e.g. G₀. And also we've started planting things right along the fence, so we'll refer to these with the subscript of f, e.g. G_f.

Bed A

September 2016

2017/10/10 (A₁): Thick mulch, Potato, Brown bean

Bed B

September 2016

Bed C

September 2016

2017/10/20 (C₀): Black beans, Big Sunflower (spread)
2017/10/20 (C₁): Brown beans, Big Sunflower, Pumpkin

Bed D

September 2016

2017/10/20 (D₀): Black beans, Big Sunflower (spread)
2017/10/20 (D₁): Brown beans, Big Sunflower, Pumpkin

Bed E

September 2016

November 2017 - Potatoes directly in mulch

2017/10/10 (E₀): Black beans, Big Sunflower (spread)
2017/10/10 (E₁): Thick mulch, Potatoes

Bed F

September 2016

October 2017 (F₀): Black beans, Big Sunflower (spread)

Bed G

September 2016

November 2017

2017/10/17 (G₁): Mulch, parsnip seeds, beans
2017/10/20 (G₀): Black beans, Big Sunflower (spread)

Bed H

September 2016

2017/10/17 (H₁): Mulch, radish, beans

Bed I

September 2016

2017/10/17 (I₁): Mulch, parsnip, beans (@end), 2 yam

Fence

2017/10/20 (B_f-G_f): mucuna, mamona, bl.bean

@mulberry2

The second mulberry (a group of three or four trees) has a mulch bed below it

2017/10/20: Brown beans, Big sunflower, Pumpkin

@arch

2017/10/10: (North) Cucumber, Green bean. (South) Corgette, Coriander
2017/10/17: (North) Tumeric. (South) Yam

@banana

2017/10/17: Ginder

@plum

2017/10/17: Garlic

@orange

2017/10/17: Tumeric

@compoo1

2017/10/17: Yam

Banhado (next to field entrance)

2017/10/17: 5 yam

Banhado (next to net)

2017/10/17: 5 yam, 3 tumeric

Vege patch 4.0

Beth's started working on version 4 which is based on some basic permaculture design principles for optimising the nutrients and water available to the plants by having carbon and compost layers below the raised garden beds.

The land is much softer and easier to work in rainy weather, but it's not much fun :-( here's a photo of Beth not having much fun digging a small swale in the garden. She dug up some baby worms which she tried not to disturb too much, but it certainly shows that our soil is nice and fertile, there must be a hundred of them in that small area at least!

Here's a few photos of the vege patch over the first six months. In July 2013 the area was just grass and Beth started laying the sheet mulch rows, then in september I put a fence around the area to protect it from cows which is shown in the first picture below. The last pictures below are from January 2014 where some things have finally started to take off.