[Music]
hi there i'm
maddie harland and i'm one of the
founders of permaculture magazine it's
an international
publication about all things sustainable
and green and low impact and i'm
sitting in my no dig vegetable
garden which is really near the house so
in permaculture design terms it's zone
one
so we started this vegetable garden
a long time ago about 25 years ago when
we first got
the garden extension where i'm sitting
was an
arable field it had no soul life
whatsoever
and so our first thought was we want to
restore this
as a biodiverse wildlife habitat but
then we discovered permaculture and we
really got the link between
healthy food and growing it at home
and minimizing our our ecological impact
in the world and creating
conservation and wildlife habitats
so we we do love our companion planting
in a way the whole garden is the
companion to the vegetable patch there
isn't
a sort of separation of this is our
ornamental
garden or this is our wildlife garden
and these are our veggies we
we like to blend and have as much edge
as possible
and and the reasons for this is because
we want wildlife in
in the garden not only for the pleasure
but also for
the pet predator pest control balance
but one of the really simple things that
you can do is just grow
pot marigold at the edge of
a bed to bring in beneficial insects
and this all started with just a few
seeds a few years ago
they go to seed and and then they'll
seed we transplant them
to places where we want them usually on
on the edges
they add color and they're just a really
good companion plant
for veggies so the idea of this garden
was always that it would be no dig that
we
would always use a lot of mulch to not
have bare soil
cover the soil as much as we could
to mimic natural principles and and to
grow
completely organic fresh veg for as
much of the year as we possibly can
so that this is our overhanging bean
structure the great thing about it is
the beans hang
down so you don't have to search for
them and it means that you pick
every bean that's available so that the
plant keeps growing
as long as the season lasts and it also
has another advantage that
underneath it you can grow things like
salads that in
the height of summer tend to bolt
so once these beans are up and over this
arch it will cast more shade
and that will hopefully prevent some of
the
difficulties with bolting crops we do
grow tend to grow in in rows it just
makes it much easier to
hand hoe and we do
use our own garden compost so i'm
looking at the bed in front
of me just here and i i can see that
i've got some volunteer
tomato seedlings from last year which
you know would not grow true but they're
easy enough to
go out between the leaks so one of the
themes of this garden
is thinking about how you can not only
grow
crops on the horizontal so here
i would say that these courgettes are
horizontal
but also what can i fit in on the
vertical
to create structure and interest and
contrast in the garden
so here this little guild is a mixture
of
some self-seeded flowers at the front
poppy
and marigold once again two different
types of courgette
and then a couple of very large
sunflowers
which we'll really enjoy when they come
into
full flower in a few weeks
to be quite honest now um
in year 25 or so of this garden
we have very very few slugs because we
have a lot of
slow worms birds
we have thrushes in the garden that eat
the snail
and and we also have toads and frogs
that
love the habitat of the wildflower
meadow and the
and the long grasses it wasn't like this
at the beginning
that we were plagued with slugs until we
got our ponds and our
habitats established so this is how we
like to
grow our squashes in this bed
for the whole of spring until about two
weeks ago were broad beans
and we've cropped the broad beans taken
them out
but at the same time we start off squash
plants
as the broad beans are maturing so the
idea of this
bed is to stack in space and time
so to stack by having a vertical crop
starting off while we've got a
horizontal crop
and also then to mix two crops so when
one matures
the other one takes over and will
festoon this bamboo
with hanging squash and it's really
delicious
in the sense of utter pragmatism
if i was going to design this girl's
garden
for maximum yield i would have
rectangular beds because rectangular
beds are much easier to net
from cabbage whites and
and to protect against frost with fleece
and
all those very sensible practical things
but when we started this garden we
we actually were given these railway
sleepers
which incidentally we have lined with
with
um a heavy-duty plastic because the
railway sleepers can
leech tar in into beds which is
carcinogenic
and at that time the easiest way
to lay them out was to not cut them
so to lay them out in triangles and we
were also because this is right next to
our patio
and house we we wanted to make a sort of
pottage a garden
that had flowers as well as vegetables
and we were looking to make it look as
attractive and beautiful as we could
hence the comfrey hedge that you'll see
around it because we wanted to give it a
boundary
that was also really practical so the
comfrey hedge is there
it brings in lots and lots of gorgeous
bumble bees particularly
in in its first flowering in in the
spring
it delineates this part of the garden
and then we cut it
and compost it or or use it as a fresh
comfrey mulch on the beds in between
crops
so this is just a small greenhouse it's
eight by six
foot so it's just a little domestic
greenhouse and we like to grow as much
as we
can in it so at the back is
a peach tree which is wonderfully
productive
tim prunes it so it's expelled
and it's actually not on a rootstock
so it's an own root peach and the
original
peach stones come from an eco village
near berlin called zeg eco village and
were given to me
by achim a permaculturist and
and gardner and he'd selected the best
peaches from stone and grew them all
around
the eco village and he gave me a bag
full and i bought it home and propagated
some and
this is one of our most successful peach
trees it
fruits gorgeous luscious large peaches
every year and it's really delicious
you can't grow a healthy garden without
really wonderful soil and the way to get
wonderful soil is not to buy it in a bag
but
make it yourself so compost everything
there's loads of information out there
on composting
we compost absolutely everything we can
in this house so kitchen waste
all of our weeds any trimmings from the
garden
and then we we also
shred all our paper in the office and we
we also use
cardboard layers in the compost bins
and tiger worms love cardboard and munch
it up quickly and it sort of
creates a breeding habitat so
we make a lot of compost and we turn it
too we don't just make a
thing of compost and leave it we turn it
at least
once and that hugely speeds up the
process
and makes much healthier compost
so if you want to find out more about
permaculture we publish a permaculture
magazine which is quarterly and that's
available all over the world it's
in print but we also have a digital
edition that you can find out more about
at our website we've published over 100
books on permaculture and other
related subjects and there are evil book
versions of those
but we also like to do the gift economy
so we've got a whole
collection of free ebooks some
introductory some in more detail
and they're all available on our website
as well