Blogspot - Interia Dezain

It's been a warm and wonderful spring here and with the help of our amazing team of volunteers we've been making great progress in the gardens. We welcome Chris Mallorie, Abi Ryder and their son Ed to the team, and a short but sweet visit from Chris Kirby-Lambert who has been checking out the invertebrates in the gardens as part of our biodiversity study. The Team  So here's what we've been up to since the last post . In the Market Garden  The focus this week has been on planting out, taking advantage of the cooler weather and rainy periods that provide great conditions for new plants to settle in. Tomato plants going in. This year we lost our tomato seedlings to windy weather so have purchased plants from the local market and neighbours  This year we decided to grow the majority of our warm season crops in flats. The main reason for this decision was that during the last two seasons we experienced some prolonged cool and wet periods during the spring and many of ou...

Last summer I was contacted by Teresa Silva and Paulo Matos who having purchased 28 ha (70 acres) of land in Beja, Portugal are looking towards establishing a regenerative enterprise/homestead on the property. Tojiera Final Concept Design -  Illustration by   georgipavlov.net    The brief was to analyse the site and identify the potential of the land for future regenerative development. As always it was a pleasure to be working with Georgi Pavlov - www.georgipavlov.net  on this project. Property Location in South Portugal  During this blog I'll go through our broad design process and then present the design concept we came up with for this site. Where to Start?   The process starts with a conversation with Teresa and Paulo to gain an understanding of their circumstances and to establish their broad objectives. This is followed up with a questionnaire for them to complete in their own time in order to gather more details about the land and their lifesty...

We've done a couple of pond installations recently, one for our new perennial polyculture trial garden (Ataraxia) and another for Catherine Zanev's  permaculture farm/orchard. Wildlife ponds in our gardens I thought I'd write a post to share our experience and provide an overview of our pond design and installation process. In this post we'll look at locating a pond, pond design and pond digging and in part two I'll write about lining and part three planting and landscaping the pond. Introduction  In both the recent ponds we dug we hired a machine and driver to carry out the dig. Previous ponds we've dug by hand. With some willing help a 6 x 4 x 1.5 m pond is very do-able and I'd estimate that  3-4 people with good tools would take about 8- 10 hrs on moderately light soils, probably longer in clay. The Pond in the Paulownia Garden - dug by hands  The recent ponds we made required 3 and 4 m depths and were larger in surface area so we opted for machines. For...