Blogspot - Interia Dezain

With the new perennial garden plantings in, raised beds prepped and seeds sown for the market garden, this week was mainly maintenance (watering, weeding) and time to start work on an unfinished project.  Check here for  Week 1 ,  Week 2   and Week 3 updates Water Harvesting Reservoir  We're looking to supply the irrigation needs for the garden at the volunteer house with just rain water by storing the water collected from the roof in a reservoir. This will be the first pond/reservoir that we've made with a rectangular shape (approx 2.5 m deep 2 m wide and 6 m long). The rectangular shape and depth of this reservoir will reduce evaporation but it's unsuitable for attracting the diversity of aquatic plant life and insects that we usually have in our ponds. We do plan to introduce some habitat in the way of floating islands and land/water interfaces for frogs and other aquatic wildlife Rectangular shape reservoirs often become breeding grounds for mosquitos and t...

We've had a productive week in the gardens planting out more of the biomass beds, sowing the bulk of the market garden crops and tidying up the forest gardens for our open day at the weekend. Garden Plants - left - Right  Tulipa sp. - Lunaria rediviva - Akebia quinata - Caragana arborescens  Planting in Ataraxia -  Perennial polyculture Trial Garden  This week in the garden we continued to plant out the biomass trial beds as well as the windbreak and pond embankment. For more info on our polyculture trials see our webpage here . Biomass Plantings C4 perennial grass   M iscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus   were planted into the trial bed. These plants grow well on marginal land having very low nutritional requirements and growing very fast. These attributes may make this plant an excellent "grow your own" mulch option. We'll see..... Young   M iscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus    plant grown from a rhizome We are al...

It's been a glorious spring week in Shipka!  This week we've continued planting in Ataraxia, our new perennial polyculture trial garden, have been foraging in the mountains for wild garlic and continued preparing the beds in the market garden for the annual crops. You can read about what we got up to in week one here  and  here's what we've been up to this week. The Perennial Polyculture Trial Garden We started to plant out the biomass beds in Ataraxia and added some more productive and support plants into the polyculture beds. Ataraxia - The Perennial Polyculture Trial Garden We've selected a range of pioneer plants to grow in the biomass beds and will be studying the suitability of each species for use as mulch plants. The ideal plant should grow well on poor soils, have relatively low water demand, be fast growing and tolerant of regular pruning. We are experimenting with three categories of plants in the biomass beds.   Nitrogen Fixing Trees and Shrubs ...