Periwinkle (vinca major) plants make great ground cover. They suppress weeds, keep moisture in the soil, have pretty flowers in the spring and provide attractive foliage for 10 monthsof the year. They're super-easy to grow (at least here in Bulgaria, Zone 7B) and require zero work.
My kind of plant! :-)
They're even easy to propagate through tip rootings. I've planted them in many places in my permaculture garden and foodforest orchard.
The first calendula (pot marigold) flower of the year has appeared in my garden.
I didn't plant it - it's self-seeded in my vegetable bed .
I let it grow among the vegetables. My garden is a mish-mash of things anyway, everything growing in a merry mix, which is good for the soil and for plant health. Besides, calendula petals are edible - I can add them to soups, stews and smoothies - so this makes it a vegetable anyway. 🤣
1/ #BillMollison's first words from The #Permaculture Designers Manual: DESIGN
PHILOSOPHY
"Although this book is about #design, it is also about
values & #ethics, & above all about a sense of
personal responsibility for earth care. I have written at
times in the first person, to indicate that it is not a
detached, impersonal, or even unbiased document
Every book or publication has an author, and what that author chooses to write about is subjective, for that person alone determines the subject, content, & the values expressed or omitted. I am not detached from,
but have been passionately involved with this earth,
& so herein give a brief vision of what I think can be
achieved by anyone."
We are delighted to launch a new version of the Agroecology Map Platform. We've made minor improvements and enhanced usability. We've also fixed some bugs and improved integration with other maps.
The platform has now also been translated into French as well as English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Apparently someone is trying to demonize sheet mulching in local #permaculture circles based on a study of chicken bedding which found that shredded cardboard had more than double the measured PFAS compared to wood chips.
unrelated use case aside (and ignoring the use of high PFAS cardboard rather than shipping boxes), by volume, with sheet mulching, you would do a layer of cardboard and 3" of wood chips to have the same effect as about 12" of woodchips alone.
So even if a layer of cardboard were 15 µg and 3" of chips were 6µg, you'd be looking at 21µg for sheetmulched vs. 24µg for chips.
But the figures are by weight. woodchips are 23.72 lbs per sq ft. cardboard is .026 lbs per sq ft.
The #coffee is growing strong. It's been a struggle to keep these babies watered in this prolonged dry season, but there they are. 2024 is dedicated to getting them all in the ground across about six hectares.
They're growing fast, so getting the prep work done for their planting is the main focus.
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El #café está creciendo fuerte. Ha sido una lucha mantener a estos bebés regados en esta prolongada secia, pero ahí están. 2024 se dedica a plantarlos todos en unas seis hectáreas mas o menos.
Crecen rápido, así que lo más importante ahorita es preparar la tierra para recibirlas.
Everything is a learning curve, right? In the beginning of our #coffee planting journey, we fell into the trap of making the nursery with plastic nursery bags. There are so many issues with pests and weeds, it seemed like the most obvious solution.
But damn, that's a lot of plastic on an organic farm. And we couldn't always get the right sized bags to allow for optimal growth.
In his research, Michael re-discovered an even more traditional nursery technique - he's done it for smaller, annual plants, but never at this scale or for this kind of tree.
This is our second nursery, which consists of deep beds - they are lined with plastic, but we've avoided all those little bags. When the time comes for transplanting, the walls will be broken down and the plants carefully extracted one row at a time. The hope is to give them optimal conditions for growth and to prevent root damage upon transplant.
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Todo es una curva de aprendizaje, ¿verdad? Al principio, caímos en la trampa de hacer el vivero con bolsas de plástico. Hay tantos problemas con las plagas y las malas hierbas, que parecía la solución más obvia.
Pero eso es mucho plástico en una granja ecológica. Y no siempre conseguíamos bolsas del tamaño adecuado para permitir un crecimiento óptimo.
En su investigación, Michael redescubrió una técnica de vivero aún más tradicional: lo había hecho para plantas anuales más pequeñas, pero nunca a esta escala ni para este tipo de árbol.
Este es nuestro segundo vivero, que consiste en camas profundas; están forradas de plástico, pero hemos evitado todas esas bolsitas. Cuando llegue el momento del trasplante, se derribarán las paredes y se extraerán cuidadosamente las plantas, fila por fila. La esperanza es darles unas condiciones óptimas para su crecimiento y evitar daños en las raíces en el momento del trasplante.
Hey hey #compostodon! Here's the Aerobic Digest - the third one this month, by golly - featuring a timelapse of me filling a heap with stinky food waste and rabbit excrement. Plus a video of a visit to a worm farm and some ponderings about the viability of municipal and community composting schemes.
Filled my #compost bay nearly to the top today thanks to some gifted rabbit poop and food waste, plus my own backlogs of stuff, and attempted a timelapse video!
Here’s the low-res version. Subscribe to https://the.aerobicdigest.email/ to see it in better quality and a bit slower, with an explanation of what's going in there, coming as soon as I write it.
Some things just don't biodegrade well here, and part of it is that we're still perfecting our composting workflow and making sure our heaps don't overdry and die in our arid environment. We're getting better all the time, and it's a learning process. But in the meantime, I've been doing a lot of research on biochar. Most of the USDA fact sheets only talk about using biochar from wood or agricultural "wastes" like cornstalks, straw, etc. However, I know for a fact that in much of South America it's common to burn animal bones, manure, and more.
So, talk to me about biochar! Do you use it? What do you burn? What have your results been? Do you combine it with other soil remediation tactics (compost, compost teas, etc.)?
Interested in #FOSS but haven't taken the time to explore it? Or familiar but wanting to dive deeper? Have no idea what that is, but are interested in decreasing your reliance on evil corporations?
If any of the above, check out the #30DayFOSSChallenge. In April I will be posting all about it, and encouraging others to join me. Hope you come along for the journey.
The chemical industry tries to convince gardeners that dead-nettles amust be destroyed with chemicals.
But there's no need to poison them or to pull them out. They're not harmful weeds. Actually, they're edible and contain valuable mineral nutrients so you can simply treat them as volunteeer vegetables. 🙂 I like to add them to creamed soup.
Hey hey #compostodon! The Aerobic Digest is out in which I talk about how I suddenly have loads of red wiggler worms in my heap and do a deep-dive into biochar What is it? How to I make it? Why should I make it?
Gardeners: do you have recommendations for reputable resources/experts on planting seeds directly in the soil? I’m in USDA zone 7B with a last frost of April 15 (probably a little earlier this year) and I don’t have energy to start seeds inside and transplant them. They will go into raised metal beds prepared with quality soil and an in-bed vermicompost system. Thank you. Also open to suggestions for hashtags and groups. #Gardening#GardeningMastodon #VegetableGardening#Permaculture@gardening
Of the carrots I sowed last autumn for a March crop, only one has survived. However, it tasted superb, with a juicy, crunchy texture, much nicer than the store-bought, chemical-laden carrots.
I grow all my vegetables organically, without nasty chemicals.