Introduction

..In which I explain a bit about how I became fascinated with the ideas of permaculture, no-dig and low-impact gardening – and why I believe these techniques are an asset for anybody who gardens for food.

 

When I started gardening about 10 years ago, I signed up for an allotment and bought hundreds of gardening books with great excitement. I wanted to grow my own food, to munch fresh picked berries in the sunshine and save money on armfuls of leafy greens and salads.

The books I bought from high street shops all told me to garden the same way – dig and weed your beds, plant new annual seeds every year, use specialist fertiliser. They did mention compost heaps, but only so far as you dig the compost and manure into the bed every winter. I guess this is familiar to anyone who gardens in England. You have to grow the plants from seed every year if you use the F1 varieties available on the high street (more on this in a later post). The process involves buying compost each year as well as seeds, fertiliser etc  – when you figure out the amount you are spending on this, you find it’s considerably cheaper to buy your vegetables from the supermarket. You also have to water your precious vegetables daily through the summer or a lot of them die.

I didn’t want to use chemicals on my plot, so I fought a losing battle with my organic weeds despite devoting hours every weekend to digging, and my vegetables were stunted and tiny (except the Jerusalem artichokes!). After three years I was really tired and discouraged.

Shortly after that we bought our first house, complete with a little garden. (Only 11ft wide, but luckily about 60ft long). The soil in the garden was poor – it was a layer of topsoil over rubble put there when the house was built. The previous owner had cut down some fruit trees, leaving just stumps. There was a narrow border and an old, falling-down shed and  – no allotment association to tell me what I could and couldn’t do! I handed the allotment back and concentrated on my own little space.

I went a bit crazy and started buying plants at car boot sales and garden centres and online, borrowing cuttings from freinds and family, and because of the lack of space I just jammed the plants in anywhere they would fit with no regard to garden design.

About the same time my friend introduced me to the idea of “No-Dig“, which appealed to me instinctively – if you can organise your garden so you’re not bashing away at it all the time, why not? Laying mulch on the ground around your plants is much easier, and the plants don’t dry out so easily either .

 

Further reading gave me some more great ideas –

• building raised beds with a layer of compost already in them to act as fertiliser as the plants grow,
• planting trees around a compost bin so they benefit from the nutrients without you ever having to dig out the compost
• Planting on several levels to make the best use of space (known in permaculture as intercropping or tiered planting- plants that like shade such as wild garlic under the trees, climbing vines like grapes and passionfruit up the fence, adding gooseberry and currant bushes amongst the herbs in my borders.
• Choosing perennial plants over annual ones so you don’t have to keep growing from seed every year
• Covering the ground with plants you have chosen, so that you don’t get weeds and water isn’t lost from the soil
• Mixing plants around rather than planting them in neat rows – encourages beneficial insects and baffles ones that want to eat your crops

Last year was the first year all of my plants came to fruition and I had so much bounty without having to dig at all or water anything, and I didn’t have to use any fertiliser or weedkiller. My little trees came through like champions and we ate fruit from July to October.

This year I have been offered a chance to experiment on a much bigger, more difficult plot of land, so I’ve been researching much more deeply about how to survey the land and make use of what is already there. I have been incredibly grateful to the permaculture experts and dabblers who have made their experience available free online, such as Aranya, Self-willed Land and others – as I show you my projects, I’ll link to others who have led the way.