Permaculture Garden
As I mentioned in the last post, I was reading Graham’s Permaculture Garden while I was on Holiday.
In over 40 years of Gardening I’ve read lots of books and there aren’t many authors that really impress me but I think Graham has to join Geoff Hamilton and Ethelind Fearon on the podium.
It’s a concise and practical review of how permaculture could be applied to a normal garden. He covers all the usual permaculture ideas about doing more with less, grouping things in zones to save energy and to work towards a woodland garden which involves a sensible progression rather than a rotation to increase the diversity of the space. He covers layering and stacking, the use of swales along the contour to facilitate passive irrigation, the benefits of how to make use of the edge effect and the benefits of using perennial vegetables rather than annuals in a no dig progression.
The best thing is that it has a series of easy to execute 1 day projects including containers on concrete, developing a tree garden, creating a grey water reed bet and the ominous sounding German Mound.
Best of all he tells you in explicit detail how to turn a lawn into potatoes by spreading cardboard round the dripline of a handy tree and covering it in compost. Put the potatoes in, follow up with beans over the winter and bodge in some rasp canes the following autumn and your on your way to your very own forest garden.
Watch this space.