Our garden adventure has drawn to an end this year, somewhat prematurely as we left France to return across the pond, to continue our North American adventures. I will leave here some impressions and lessons we learnt from this experience, may it help or at least amuse any gardeners reading this!
- The Three Sisters are a lot of fun to play with! (See multiple other posts in this topic)
- Perennial cabbages are amazing!
- 10 varieties of cherry tomatoes makes your plate pretty and your mouth water!
- Chickens are amazing garden companions, I wouldn’t like to be without them!
- Sheet mulching is great; top mulching is key!
- Many things can be started as seedlings, for the better: beets, legumes, cabbages, squash…
- Many weeds are delicious! Few are a serious pain!
Overall when I think of the lessons learned in the garden this year, I think of a lot of things I want to do differently next time:
- Plant lots of early ripening vegetables, even if they are not the usual favourites: beets, turnips, radishes, kohlrabi are great for an early harvest, are really are much better when they come from your very own garden. I don’t want to be waiting for my first tomatoes in mid-July for a first harvest again!
- Greens need to be planted regularly. I know it, but I forget it. We only got greens for a short period this year because we made only one planting.
- More perennials! I want perennial alliums, cabbages, groundcherries (for real! Physalis heterophylla), sunflowers, lovage, watercress, Good King Henry, New Zealand Spinach, etc.
- More guilds! Using nitrogen fixing trees in the garden, creating perennial guilds with walnuts, goumis, paw-paws, wolfberries, currants, maypop, hazelnuts, mulberries, Saskatoon berries, etc.
- Back to more conventional plants though, I want to grow at least a few totally reliable veggies, like chard and cabbage. Things that can be counted on. I’ll be more selective and ignore the dodgy-sounding plants like garden huckleberry or snake gourds. I mean, experimenting is good, but selecting experiments that seem promising beats being indiscriminate and buying anything I don’t know for the sake of novelty!
- There’s no rush to plant early. Plants that are seeded or transplanted into a cold ground will not do well, whereas plants that might be started later will easily catch up. Plant growth isn’t linear in that way, it depends on the weather conditions. Maybe with a good greenhouse or coldframe set up it can still be beneficial to plant early, but otherwise it can be a waste of time.
Looking forward to more gardening, farming, permaculturing wildly in the future!
No comments:
Post a Comment