Blogspot - Interia Dezain

Last week Dylan and I set off on a road trip to discover the flora and fauna of the North East of Bulgaria. Our first stop was to  Catherine Zanev 's farm in Todorovo, North Bulgaria. As those of you familiar with our project may recall, this was a farm I designed in 2013. I had not visited the place for some time and was very excited to see how the plans had emerged into reality.     Catherine's goals for the plot were to create a polyculture farm with focus on producing fruit for juicing, to include vegetable production for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) scheme and to experiment with dye plants. The design was complete by 2015 and implementation began that year.     The 5 ha polyculture plot Suhi Dol on the right, locally practiced intensive monoculture farming on the left   The design concept for Suhi Dol was to create an agroforestry system of "Belts" that are comprised of mixed species fruit trees, soft fruits and nitrogen fixin...

It's been a relaxed week in the gardens and as the summer draws to a close the harvest season is upon us with plenty to pick and process as we wind down into the Autumn.   Aponia - The Market Garden  We're irrigating the market garden once a week during the summer. This can be up to 15 weeks in a dry year but this year we have only needed to water 4 times so far, although I expect another 4 weeks of irrigation will be needed. Our irrigation method is somewhat unusual in that we have access to a mountain stream that we can divert into our gardens. We use the paths as irrigation channels and block the end with sacks full of sawdust thereby raising the water level so that the water permeates into the raised beds. Capillary action also serves to draw the water up into the soil. If we can run the water over night this is sufficient to provide water to all of the plants in the bed but the stream is also used by other growers so we'll also water from above with the watering cans...

Another hot week in the gardens, too hot to start new projects but plenty of harvesting, watering and  seed collecting to be done.  If you follow our project you will probably know that I like to name our gardens after concepts and terminology from the classical period of Ancient Greece or at least you may have noticed that the gardens have weird names :)  Ezekiel who joined us last week asked why the market garden did not have a such a name which prompted me to fix that, so from now on the market garden will be referred to as .........drum rolling .....   Aponia - The Market Garden  It's quite amazing how fast  Paulownia tomentosa - Foxglove Tree  can grow. We use these trees amid some of the vegetable beds to provide shade, biomass and the massive leaves make good temporary containers for small fruits and veg. When the trees get too big (within 3 years) we cut them and use them for fence posts or stakes. Multiple stems grow back from the stump t...