Hello, today I'm continuing to look at how to plan a better garden.
I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm.
This video is a collaboration with Jess over at Roots and Refuge Farm and if
you're not familiar with Jess, well, she'll introduce herself.
Hi I'm Jess and
this is Roots and Refuge Farm. I'm currently in my greenhouse where I'm
just kicking off this year's gardening endeavors and I just wanted to take a
moment and introduce you to my farm. We keep a herd of dairy goats, Nubians and
Lamancha, which we breed for milk. We also have alpacas for fiber and
because they're awesome. We breed a type of pig called Mangalitsa for meat, known
for their curly hair and we have a flock of laying hens.
We are homesteading on about seven acres here in Central Arkansas, which is in the
southern United States. It's growing zone 7B. This is my raised bed
garden, which at the current moment is not much to look at, but in the summer
and spring and during the winter whenever we have a winter garden planted,
this cranks out a lot of our big families food needs.
Jess and I were
talking about how excited we are about the new growing season because there's
so much to come, there's so much potential.
On days like these, when the world has
almost disappeared in the freezing fog, it's really hard to imagine just how
fantastic a growing space this will be.
So last time I talked about intentional observation
and now, going on from that, the next stage for me is to turn those
notes into imaginations of just how much we're likely to grow this year.
When I started creating this garden four years ago, it was pretty much a blank canvas.
It was just a field with grass in it and a few old mature fruit trees, but
I had the belief and I had the faith that I could turn it into a really productive space.
The soil was really poor quality and had very little life in it.
But I knew that if I gave the ground the right ingredients, nature would do
its thing and rebuild itself.
The next phase of planning your better garden is
to do some imagining and some remembering, so that you can start seeing
the potential for abundance.
At first glance everything on our homestead is in stasis,
it's not growing, it's not doing anything. But when you look really
closely you can see all the little buds are starting to form on our fruit trees
and it won't be very long before it's absolutely smothered in blossoms and
then leaves, followed by some very, very tasty fruit.
Every year I'm surprised and
delighted by the way in which this space transforms from a rather sad looking,
muddy mess into a lush green full space that's just bursting with food.
So how do we begin this visualizing or imagining process? Well, one of the things that I do
is to look back and see what I did in previous years. I've got really good
about making sure that I take lots of photographs and now video, of what I've
planted where, what grew really well and what really didn't flourish.
Most of our broad bean harvest
it's just dead. Not enough moisture deeper down in the soil so it hasn't
formed deep roots and then it isn't able to survive the lack of rain.
And of course nowadays I draw my inspiration online, on the internet,
places like Twitter and here on YouTube.
There are so many really good gardeners out there creating videos and writing
blog posts, so I can continue to learn and be inspired by them.
One of the really good things I've learnt is to use panels to create archways, just like Jess
does in her garden, for growing plants up. Here in the UK I couldn't find cattle
panels in the same way that they seem to have them in the States, but I did find
these panels which are 8 foot by 4 foot. And I fixed two of them together to form
an archway and in this tunnel I've got roses growing up them and
during the summer I have spaghetti squashes as well.
I draw inspiration from other places places like Hampton Court Palace with it's 0.8 acre - the
same size as our whole plot - they have a no dig vegetable garden there which I
just think is beautiful. And from Wisley where I visited. What a delight it is,
there's masses of things like the cup and saucer plants here, so there's lots
and lots of things to encourage pollinators and even by the French beans there's
salvias at the bottom to encourage the bees and other pollinators to visit.
So I'm just gonna have a quick look round and then I'm gonna have a really proper
look round and just spend now another hour or so feeling ver,y very
envious in such a beautiful garden.
And I get inspired by friends' gardens and also members of my Facebook group
who post photos out of their gardens and what they're doing, all of which
inspire me in various different ways around the garden.
And when I look at
those really huge palatial gardens,I try and think how I could scale those
ideas down to work on our site.
And sometimes I'm inspired by seeing an
image of a terrarium - a really small glass jar with plants in it, and it
gets me thinking about companion planting or something like that.
So I try and draw inspiration from anywhere that I can and to scale it up or scale it
down so it will work in my garden.
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We can have quite a few
beds that appear to be almost empty except for these sticks sticking up all
the way through it and they're to remind me where the perennial beans are planted.
And at this time of year, when all the beds have in them is a deep layer of
mulch, that's when I really have to start using my imagination about where I want
things to be and the potential for their growth this year.
I'm often asked about the varieties that we grow and where to get the seeds from.
So I've pulled together a list of every variety that we grew last year, all
the plants that are growing in our garden here. And if you'd like access to
those lists, all you need to do is sign up for our newsletter and in our next
newsletter there will be a link taking you through to some hidden pages on our
website, where you'll be able to peruse those. I'll leave a link in the
description box so you can sign up for our newsletter.
In late January we still have plenty of food in the ground waiting to be
harvested, things like the dill, which died down in the autumn, has come back
again already, some celeriac for little bit later in spring, some beet roots and
the Hamburg parsley which is a parsley but we eat the roots of it.
So our beds are still quite full and it reminds me that actually the growing
process does continue through a really long season here. We garden in the
equivalent of zone 8b, so it's quite a mild climate. It doesn't get excessively
hot (except for maybe a couple of years ago), it doesn't get excessively cold
(except for maybe three years ago), but generally we don't get huge extremes of
heat or cold that there are in other places.
So in this temperate climate we can grow a really wide range of fruit and
vegetables over a really long period.
I find it incredible each year I plant
these tiny weeny seeds into soil and that they grow into plants, so rapidly, so
willingly, and I continue to remind myself that nature just wants to grow.
In this area I've planted onions and shallots and some elephant garlic and
they'll get inter planted with carrots in three or four months time.
And I think it's important to remember just as Rome wasn't built in a day,
creating your garden isn't going happen instantly either.
This garden has changed
significantly over the last four years, partly through observing and trial and
error and things that I thought I would do, some of them have just taken longer
than I expected them to, and other things have taken longer by design. So this area
on both sides of me here, my patrons garden and the market garden, were both
chicken fields to start with, with temporary fencing which we took out bit
by bit and created these other areas. But I wanted the birds in here,
partly because I wanted the birds but also by them being in here the soil
fertility has been improved and increased. And it also gave me time to
concentrate on other areas, the more productive areas, before I came and did
the floral garden. This long border is pretty much all flowers, because I
wanted something attractive that would also attract pollinators. So I built this
just about a year ago and filled it with perennial flowers. Inevitably there are
weeds in, so I'll have to keep on top of those a little bit. So this was built in our
third year here and it will take a while for it to fill out and I'm not in any
hurry for it to happen. I put annuals in it this year to give it
some color and to fill the gaps and over the next few years,
hopefully, the perennials will spread and fill this area and then this border will
pretty much look after itself.
Over this winter I've been researching more plants
to put in this border. These are all edible plants, but they're also highly ornamental.
And that's the thing about the downtime in winter and very early
spring, it gives you the opportunity to explore more ideas and to start to build
a framework for how you want to put those things into your garden.
In the six years that we've been homesteading, we've learned so many
lessons and we're still learning. We've learned to care for animals, we've
learned to garden organically, but one of the things that has been one of the
greatest joys, that we really didn't see coming, was getting to share it with you guys.
Because of the YouTube community, we're able to share our experience and to
invite you in. And so thank you for visiting today and I will see you again sson.
So Jess and I invite you to join this
collaboration and tell us what you've been doing over the winter and early
spring to prepare you have a new garden and to share your hints and tips to turn
that potential into an abundance.