Growing garden(s)

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Some photographs of the two gardens, one started from scratch in March/April, the other from scratch in July. They have now merged into one big main garden, in which the the following have been planted:

Carrots, spinach, chard, brussel sprouts, garlic, kale, tomatoes, peppers, chilli-peppers, peppadews, bush beans (2 types), pole beans (4 types), potatoes (2 types), squashes, pumpkins, brinjal, onions, leeks, raddish, lettuce, rocket, corn, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, jelly melon, lodas of herbs.

Note the 2 final photos, which show how it all started in this garden area. The ground really was a solid, barren flat lacking fertility. The popular, insane method of farming that dominates globally is to plough the soil and chemical add fertilisers. We have not done this (in fact we speak openly of the dangers of such petro-chem methods) and we are seeing beautiful growth in the garden.

The beds are all layered as follow: fresh manure, dried grass or straw, aged manure, dried grass/straw, aged manure, dried grass/straw, compost. The bed building/layering process is quite labour intensive but, once made, the beds will only ever need compost top-ups. We allowed the beds approximately two months to settle before planting in them.

The dripper system should be evident in one of the pictures. This is a water-mains system; we are lucky enough to have a mains outlet, which we have had to use for irrigation because it’s difficult to spend over two hours watering daily at times. Such a large amount of watering is required only during the hot and dry summer months though. Soon an attempt will be made to integrate a gravity-water system into the mix, which means that our rain water catchment will supplement the watering, and eventually be the sole watering source when we have enough rain water tanks.

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