Beautiful No Dig Permaculture Kitchen Garden | Small-Scale Potager Style Vegetable Garden

[Music] hi there i'm maddie harland and i'm one of the founders of permaculture magazine it's an international publication about all things sustainable and green and low impact and i'm sitting in my no dig vegetable garden which is really near the house so in permaculture design terms it's zone one so we started this vegetable garden a long time ago about 25 years ago when we first got the garden extension where i'm sitting was an arable field it had no soul life whatsoever and so our first thought was we want to restore this as a biodiverse wildlife habitat but then we discovered permaculture and we really got the link between healthy food and growing it at home and minimizing our our ecological impact in the world and creating conservation and wildlife habitats so we we do love our companion planting in a way the whole garden is the companion to the vegetable patch there isn't a sort of separation of this is our ornamental garden or this is our wildlife garden and these are our veggies we we like to blend and have as much edge as possible and and the reasons for this is because we want wildlife in in the garden not only for the pleasure but also for the pet predator pest control balance but one of the really simple things that you can do is just grow pot marigold at the edge of a bed to bring in beneficial insects and this all started with just a few seeds a few years ago they go to seed and and then they'll seed we transplant them to places where we want them usually on on the edges they add color and they're just a really good companion plant for veggies so the idea of this garden was always that it would be no dig that we would always use a lot of mulch to not have bare soil cover the soil as much as we could to mimic natural principles and and to grow completely organic fresh veg for as much of the year as we possibly can so that this is our overhanging bean structure the great thing about it is the beans hang down so you don't have to search for them and it means that you pick every bean that's available so that the plant keeps growing as long as the season lasts and it also has another advantage that underneath it you can grow things like salads that in the height of summer tend to bolt so once these beans are up and over this arch it will cast more shade and that will hopefully prevent some of the difficulties with bolting crops we do grow tend to grow in in rows it just makes it much easier to hand hoe and we do use our own garden compost so i'm looking at the bed in front of me just here and i i can see that i've got some volunteer tomato seedlings from last year which you know would not grow true but they're easy enough to go out between the leaks so one of the themes of this garden is thinking about how you can not only grow crops on the horizontal so here i would say that these courgettes are horizontal but also what can i fit in on the vertical to create structure and interest and contrast in the garden so here this little guild is a mixture of some self-seeded flowers at the front poppy and marigold once again two different types of courgette and then a couple of very large sunflowers which we'll really enjoy when they come into full flower in a few weeks to be quite honest now um in year 25 or so of this garden we have very very few slugs because we have a lot of slow worms birds we have thrushes in the garden that eat the snail and and we also have toads and frogs that love the habitat of the wildflower meadow and the and the long grasses it wasn't like this at the beginning that we were plagued with slugs until we got our ponds and our habitats established so this is how we like to grow our squashes in this bed for the whole of spring until about two weeks ago were broad beans and we've cropped the broad beans taken them out but at the same time we start off squash plants as the broad beans are maturing so the idea of this bed is to stack in space and time so to stack by having a vertical crop starting off while we've got a horizontal crop and also then to mix two crops so when one matures the other one takes over and will festoon this bamboo with hanging squash and it's really delicious in the sense of utter pragmatism if i was going to design this girl's garden for maximum yield i would have rectangular beds because rectangular beds are much easier to net from cabbage whites and and to protect against frost with fleece and all those very sensible practical things but when we started this garden we we actually were given these railway sleepers which incidentally we have lined with with um a heavy-duty plastic because the railway sleepers can leech tar in into beds which is carcinogenic and at that time the easiest way to lay them out was to not cut them so to lay them out in triangles and we were also because this is right next to our patio and house we we wanted to make a sort of pottage a garden that had flowers as well as vegetables and we were looking to make it look as attractive and beautiful as we could hence the comfrey hedge that you'll see around it because we wanted to give it a boundary that was also really practical so the comfrey hedge is there it brings in lots and lots of gorgeous bumble bees particularly in in its first flowering in in the spring it delineates this part of the garden and then we cut it and compost it or or use it as a fresh comfrey mulch on the beds in between crops so this is just a small greenhouse it's eight by six foot so it's just a little domestic greenhouse and we like to grow as much as we can in it so at the back is a peach tree which is wonderfully productive tim prunes it so it's expelled and it's actually not on a rootstock so it's an own root peach and the original peach stones come from an eco village near berlin called zeg eco village and were given to me by achim a permaculturist and and gardner and he'd selected the best peaches from stone and grew them all around the eco village and he gave me a bag full and i bought it home and propagated some and this is one of our most successful peach trees it fruits gorgeous luscious large peaches every year and it's really delicious you can't grow a healthy garden without really wonderful soil and the way to get wonderful soil is not to buy it in a bag but make it yourself so compost everything there's loads of information out there on composting we compost absolutely everything we can in this house so kitchen waste all of our weeds any trimmings from the garden and then we we also shred all our paper in the office and we we also use cardboard layers in the compost bins and tiger worms love cardboard and munch it up quickly and it sort of creates a breeding habitat so we make a lot of compost and we turn it too we don't just make a thing of compost and leave it we turn it at least once and that hugely speeds up the process and makes much healthier compost so if you want to find out more about permaculture we publish a permaculture magazine which is quarterly and that's available all over the world it's in print but we also have a digital edition that you can find out more about at our website we've published over 100 books on permaculture and other related subjects and there are evil book versions of those but we also like to do the gift economy so we've got a whole collection of free ebooks some introductory some in more detail and they're all available on our website as well

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 255,016

Rating: 4.9692922 out of 5

Keywords: permaculture, organic gardening, no dig, no dig gardening, permaculture uk, permaculture gardening uk, potager garden, kitchen garden, permaculture kitchen garden, vegetable garden, Raised bed garden

Id: Q8m98ux55i4

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021