Blogspot - Interia Dezain

After a long cold winter it's great to get started on the third year of our polyculture study and to welcome this year's team to the project. Gabriele and Fergus are the first to join us, along with old friends Ute, Simon, Kartini, Marlene and Karl, who have purchased some land within an area we are working towards protecting . We've been pretty busy developing the new perennial polyculture garden , preparing the beds in the market garden and clearing plots for some new tree plantings. Here's a review of what we've been up to in the market garden so far and in a future post I'll write about developments in the new trial gardens. The Market Garden  This year we'll be running three annual polycultures trials in the market garden, the usual  Zeno , some changes to last year's  Epictetus  polyculture, and a variation on that theme called   Aurelius . Produce from the gardens will be offered in veggie boxes from mid June - late November and we still have room...

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....