Blogspot - Interia Dezain

I'm a  few weeks behind on the blog as I've busy on designs and preparing for our upcoming Design and Build a Forest Garden Course:1-4 Nov  . Better late than never I hear, so here is an update from the project. We said goodbye to Ezekiel this week, at age 19 he is youngest person to have participated in the study. Thank's for your help Ezekiel, it was pleasure hosting you here. Here's Ezekiel coming back from a trek up in the mountains where we found a skull of a stag. The Bio nursery  We're coming to the final weeks of the polyculture study and market garden work for this year and our attention starts to turn towards the nursery.  In the nursery we aim to offer our customers not just plants but plant communities that can form healthy ecosystems for farms and gardens and that provide nutritious food while enhancing biodiversity. We grow and distribute the majority of the beautiful and interesting plants you can find in our nursery often collecting seeds native to t...

There is a tinge of autumn in the air. Autumn is my second favorite season, my first being the spring. I love the spring for its vigour and perfect urgency and I love the autumn for its satisfied sense of completion. Summer and winter and pretty good too, but to me they are just the build ups :) Forest Garden Plenty of fruit on the  Mespilus germanica - Medlar . Medlar are a very reliable fruit tree, never failing to produce fruits that ripen towards the end of October and into December. They are a great choice of fruit tree for many gardens, particularly small gardens, as they are self-fertile, so you only need one tree. They are also pretty much free of pests and diseases and do not requiring regular pruning beyond removing dead, diseased or overcrowded branches.  The  Paulownia tomentosa - Foxglove Tree  we cut down 6 weeks ago is growing back fast with 6 shoots emerging and the tallest already reaching 70 cm. Summer time is not a great time to cut back the P...

We've all been travelling the last few weeks. Dylan and I headed North to look for plants and reptiles, Ezekiel headed South to the Rodopes to Beglika Festival  and Victoria, Sophie and Archie headed East to the Black Sea.  Here's a few pics from our trip North. Our first stop was to Catherine Zanev and Adjmal Dulloo's farm in Todorovo, North Bulgaria that you can read about in our previous blog -  5 ha Polyculture Farm Design - Suhi Dol Revisited . The next stop was to the Danube River at Vetren   The plant diversity in the transition between the forest and the river bank is incredible there.   Dice snake - Natrix tessellata basking on drift wood  Grass Snake - Natrix natrix on the hunt Just slightly east of Vetren is the Srebarna Nature Reserve, a freshwater lake adjacent to the Danube and extending over 600 ha. It is the breeding ground of almost 100 species of birds, many of which are rare or endangered.  There is an off road track around...