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Showing posts from November, 2015

How Productive can Polycultures be? - Polyculture Trials 2015 - Home Garden Records

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Here are the results from the second year of our home garden polyculture study where we're looking at the inputs and outputs of annual herb and vegetable polycultures and how we can grow nutrient dense food whilst enhancing biodiversity. See  here for all the results of our polyculture studies from 2014 - 2016 Results in Summary  From a  9.5 m x 7 m piece of land we harvested 218 kg of vegetables including tomatoes, basil, beans, garlic and winter & summer squash, a 57 kg increase on last year. The time spent in this garden, including propagating all the plants from seed, preparing the beds, tending the plants, irrigating and harvesting amounted to 52 hrs and 51 mins or approx 14.5 minutes a day from April - October. I'm pretty sure it takes me longer than that to write it all up :) 218 kg works out at just over 6 kg of food produced per m² with an estimated local market value of just over 700 BGN, that's 10.63 BGN per m2 with an hourly rate of pay at 13.59 BGN (€6....

The Essential Guide to Everything you Need to Know about Growing Walnuts - Juglans regia

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If I were to tell you of an apocalypse proof asset that is 100% guaranteed to increase in value, both in the short (3 yrs) and long term (300 yrs), will contribute to your good health, provides aesthetic pleasure to your surroundings, has the potential to replicate itself exponentially and has parts that can be dipped into smooth melted dark chocolate, covered in cocoa powder and eaten, surely you'll be chuffed to learn that I'm referring to none other than Juglans regia - The Walnut tree. The essential guide to everything you need to know to grow walnuts      At the moment I'm struggling to think of a better thing to do than to plant a walnut tree, other than to plant more than one walnut tree:) So here I present the Essential Guide to Everything you Need to Know about Walnuts. During this article we'll be focusing on the Persian Walnut  - Juglans regia  first providing an overview of the plant followed by advice on where to plant, how to care for, uses of...