6 Crops That Will Change Your Garden Forever

hello and a very warm welcome back to the Garden in this video I want to share with you six crops that I think will transform your garden forever in a very beneficial way so the first crop is this beautiful plant in front of me it's called borage it's known well for its blue flowers which are edible they kind of give you a bit of a cucumber taste but there is a lot more to this plant firstly it can be used as a green manure you can sew it and then you can chop it down and it will break down the other thing that's amazing about it is that it will transform your garden forever because itself seeds prolifically this wasn't I didn't plant or sew anything here this is just self-seeded from last year it's a Hardy annual which means the seeds come back every single year no matter kind of how cold the winter is you can also make a really powerful liquid feed or liquid Amendment from borage using the leaves and the plants it is great for a lot of your fruiting crops such as like tomatoes and your squash and your beans now one thing that you have to understand is that borage is an absolute bee magnet both honeybees and bumblebees there's one that's flying about at the moment on average I saw a study that an average borage plant produces around 950 flowers per plant and it can replenish its nectar for each flower every two to five minutes incredible the next crop is not an edible crop but it is so powerful at helping grow amazing edible crops in the garden and it comes back year after year it's easy to propagate it's comfrey so this is comfy that we only put in last year we've already come through with one cut about to do another cut of this the amazing thing about comfrey is that it is one of the most powerful liquid amendments that you can make on the screen now I'm just going to show you a chart in comparison with say manure just so you can look at the difference and just see how highly nutritious this is because it has a really deep Tap Root that goes down and it brings all of the nutrients up so as a chop and drop material this is great for around all of your perennials to integrate into like a food Forest system the main reason why I have the comfrey here is not just for creating a liquid feed which you can also do a concentrated version of it takes a little bit longer but it doesn't smell but I'm also just going to chop and drop and mulch all of the tomato plants with this as like a slow release of nutrients but also to protect the surface of the soil now in terms of propagation it's very easy either by division or by taking root cuttings about five centimeters long and just planting them in the ground and they're going to grow the final thing that I love about comfrey is that when it does flower it was also loved by the pollinators the next plant is nasturtium this is all nasturtiums which is self-sewn it's another annual just like borage we which just self-seeds prolifically all over the garden which makes it much easier it just grows when it's ready so the nice thing about nasturtium you've got the edible leaves you've got the edible stem you've got the edible flower and also the edible green seed pods they're kind of known as Poor Man's Caper so the great thing that I love about nasturtium is that it grows really rapidly it's a great way to cover some bare ground but then when the flowers come it's a great way to add a pop of color in the corner of the garden and the flowers are especially loved by bumblebees when these are flowering there's really Drew in a nice day there's never going to be a time when a bumblebee isn't at least visiting one of the flowers as gardeners it's really important that we create a nice kind of Predator balance and part of that is attracting not just pollinators but beneficial insects one of the best ways to do that is to have flowers in the garden which is why a lot of these crops also double up as being excellent magnets for bringing those beneficials into the garden to create a nice healthy environment to hopefully grow better plants and better crops another great crop that's going to change your garden forever is of course mint mint it's a very kind of prolific grower it spreads a lot I get a lot of people saying don't plant mint because it's going to spread everywhere so my experience is that it doesn't spread everywhere but it's actually a unique characteristic of mints that can be used to benefit certain things so instead of having grass you could have mint as a cover crop or as kind of the ground layer say in a food forest or if you have say a whole bed you can just plant it with mint to keep it contained but to fill the whole bed up and enjoy it mint is so easy to propagate so you can either get a bit like this which you just pull off some of the leaves stick it in water that's going to root it's going to create a plant or you can just divide it as long as there's a bit of roots you can plant it around and one of the things that gets me really excited about mint is that there's so many different varieties to choose from this is Moroccan mint particularly good for making a fresh mint tea you also have things like chocolate mint in this Garden we also grow in basil mint that is absolutely amazing and like the other crops the flowers of mint are also particularly good at attracting beneficial insects and so if you want something that grows quickly that looks good that smells good that can cover a little bit of ground and you can use it for your cooking then mint is amazing the next crop is a favorite of many it's going to be strawberries I've got a nice big strawberry plant here lots of strawberries appearing and other strawberry plant down there they're all planted along the outside of this forage border which she planted last year and it's just self-sewn now so didn't have to say at all we're taking out plants and planting them elsewhere around the garden but as a Boris grow is quite tall it's going to act as an understory for all of these strawberries now the thing that's lovely about strawberries is that they are a forever crop because they propagate so easily by layers so they send out layers which you can then pot up transplant very very simple the main thing with strawberries as well is that they're a low growing crop so unlike say currants or raspberries where you need to make quite sophisticated net structures to protect them from Birds the strawberries you can do something that's much lower it requires less effort less netting and they just taste so so good and even if you just dedicated a single bed or borders to strawberries or you could be a little bit clever and under plant them around current bushes which is what we're planning to do you can get a lot of food a lot of delicious food in a small space the next crop is coriander also known as cilantro which is what I've got grown here such a beautiful plant really nice delicate flowers the lovely thing though is that these flowers really nice attracting those beneficial insects and pollinators you can eat the flowers you can eat the leaves you can eat the stem if you want to my favorite thing is that in here there's they've just started producing these little green seeds green coriander seeds are such a lovely delicacy kind of nice to like kind of mash up into butter to create a nice fresh coriander butter or you can just let them seed now the the way that I use coriander in the garden is I actually celebrate it when it bolts or when it runs to seed because I kind of see it as a nice edible ornamental to add little splash of delicate white around the garden but then in order for it to just self-seed so it always stays is you just want to allow a few of the plants to just naturally run their course for the seeds to turn brown they'll then just drop to the floor in the following spring they will re-sprout both inside and outside then you can transplant these and move them about your garden but I just love it it looks it looks stunning it smells really nice it is super productive and it is really going to change your garden a lot so early in the video I mentioned comfrey comfrey is one of 11 natural mulches that I highly recommend for permaculture growing recently made a video right here which you can find out all about those 11 to help you grow really nice crops and improve the health of your soil

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 191,244

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Id: aQteCPLF3wY

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Sat May 27 2023