Blogspot - Interia Dezain

Another cool and cloudy week punctuated with intense sunny spells, my favourite type of weather in the gardens. This week we continued planting out the warm season crops such as tomatoes, squash and sweetcorn, cleared out the undergrowth in the Robinia pseudoacacia coppice, worked on the irrigation channels for the perennial polyculture trial garden and picked the first of the cherries. We said goodbye to Malcolm this week - (thanks for joining us, Malcolm!) and welcomed Elise to the project. The Gardens Misty morning in the market garden. After the rains is a great time to chop and drop the vegetation building up a nice layer of water retentive organic matter before the long dry summers we usually have here.  Below the walnut tree on the southern boundary we have a good shrub layer establishing including   Prunus insititia   - Damson   and   Sambucus nigra  - Elderberry . It's common knowledge that walnuts produce a alleopathic chemical...

It's been the driest Spring I can recall  but we finally got some rain this week. Very refreshing and relieving and the perfect weather for planting out.  Tomatoes , Beans, Squash and Tagetes planted into the raised beds on an overcast day.  We did suffer some seedling losses in the cloches, the very hot and dry April combined with a few windy days seems to have taken it's toll on them.  Here's a tray of the survivors-  Climbing Bean 'Cobra' that we plant out on tripods as part of the Zeno Polyculture.  For more info on Zeno a vegetable and herb polyculture illustrated below that includes Tomatoes, Basil, Beans, Squash and Tagetes  see our previous post here  My brother Pete and his family we're visiting this week.  Pete has been keeping records of bird life in and around the gardens. You can find his reports at the bottom of this post.  Oecophora bractella is a species of gelechioid moth - photo by Peter Alfrey The legless lizard, Slow ...

Wow! can't believe how quick that week went. Here are some photos and news from the gardens this week :)  Market Garden We're continuing our polyculture trials in the Market Garden, and this year will be the 4th year of the study. You can find the results of  previous year's studies here . The below image is the general garden layout which includes various vegetable and herb polycultures, and control beds where vegetables are planted in block sequences in a more traditional system.  You can find out more about the vegetable polycultures  we grow here. Angela placing the tomato stakes and bean tripods in the polyculture and control beds. We'll start to plant everything out next week. We continue to experiment with our annual polyculture Epictetus.  Swede, parsnips and beetroot seedlings sown in strips are germinating, and we plan to plant out dwarf beans, kale and marigolds next week  Add caption An illustration of  Epictetus  It's basically a stri...