Blogspot - Interia Dezain

Can't quite believe it's late spring already, with trees full of cherries and mulberries, and shrubs full of currants and raspberries - there is no denying it :)    Last week we welcomed Daniel and Emilce to the project who have escaped the winter in Argentina to join us :)  It's quite an  international polyculture project crew pictured above with Angela - South Africa,  Daniel - Austria, Emilce - Argentina, Elise - Holland and Victoria - Belarus :)      The Perennial Polyculture Garden - Ataraxia  Emilce and Daniel chop and dropping one year growth of a green manure trial we started last year where we were assessing the most suitable method for bed preparation. You can find out more about that trial here  and we'll be publishing the results of that trial in the upcoming summer newsletter next month.   Installing the pond in the garden last spring caused inevitable disruption to the soil and plant life in the area. It always am...

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 ...