- Hi, Geoff here on a hot summer's day.
I'm with Sam,
come into the picture Sam.
Here he is, Sam Parker-Davies,
budding star in permaculture,
but just taught a PDC here in Zaytuna farm.
We're working together on the kitchen garden.
We're going to actually pull it apart
and put it in the cover crop.
There's not enough people here to maintain it.
So like most annual gardens goes into chaos pretty easily.
So we're reducing it down to one single bed on one side,
and the rest is going to go in there sort of moss balls
but fertility, very fertile moss balls,
'cause it's going into cover crop,
which kind of means it's going a layaway.
It'll sit there,
ready to be used when the crowds pick up here.
Zaytuna farm's become an eco farm in Hamlet
and eight shareholders, seven out of eight
'cause I'm already here,
kind of moving in and getting started.
Sam's one of them though.
He's got a lot to do.
Everybody's got a lot to do.
No one can look after kitchen garden right now
in these unusually, new normal
or not normally normal sort of times.
The visitors are unpredictable.
So we are going to show ya how we can take a garden apart
and put it together with fertility in solar suspension.
While the system just looks after itself,
we get on with a few other things
and we'll bring it back into abundance later on
when the energy reappears.
Stay with us, this is going to be fun.
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Okay. Day two in the kitchen garden makeover
and we've left one bed for vegetables
'cause that's all we need,
but we've got two beds, either side
which get picked up by the sprinklers anyway
and we're going to plant our subtropical pineapples
'cause they're one perennial that's gotten really well
and we're extending them.
So stay with us.
We've got a bit to do,
and we're going to show you an absolute transformation.
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So here we are,
we've really turned it around now.
We've got seed flying everywhere
as you can see,
even on my hat and we're cover cropping
what was the perennial end of the garden
that had gone out of control.
We've knocked everything over.
We've slashed everything.
We've double ripped it in both directions
and now we're just going to cover crop it.
We're going to put it in layaway.
So it'll be in moss balls,
but it'll be actually in a condition where it's,
it's not losing fertility.
You'll actually still gain fertility.
We're going to trim up our bananas here.
And instead of a banana swale footpath,
here we're going to have a banana mulch swale,
won't be a footpath.
It will just be a long banana swale full of mulch.
So a lot of nutrient held up in there.
We've got our full banana circles.
We've got a trim those
and a lot of the waste from there,
the organic material is going
into the other banana swale mulch line
or whatever we're going to call it.
Come this way
and we'll show you what we've done over this side.
So this is all going into cover crop
and you'll see it happen.
Let's show Sam cause he's throwing seed everywhere.
Sam's throwing cover crop.
There we go.
Look at that action play, right?
Throw over on this side.
and we're shaping up our beds here
that we've just ripped all the plants out.
We've run the tractor through,
we've reshaped it,
and we're going to cover crop these beds here,
either side of our perennial pineapple transplant.
So we have two rows of our perennial pineapple,
subtropical pineapples
and one veggie bed with the sprinklers left in,
all the other irrigation sprinklers are out
'cause we're just going to put it all into cover crop.
There's not enough people here to garden.
All of this area,
it's made to feed 30 people this garden.
So we're just going to cover it up with cover crop.
It'll be in a really good condition.
The soil here is absolutely full of life.
A little bit of tractor work,
a little bit of digging around and reshaping.
It's not going to do a thing to all this soil
'cause this soil's been composted.
Cover cropped, worm juice, composted.
It's had lots of mulching organic matter on it.
It's brimming with life.
So it'll bounce back.
But when we put the cover crop on,
we'll get low lots of nitrogen fixation
from the rise of bacteria.
We've shaped up our bananas here.
We prune them,
the row on the other side's getting pruned
and these banana circles here
they're all getting maintained.
We're going to have a lot of banana stems.
We've got a lot of pawpaw trunks.
We put 'em all in the bottom swale trenches.
So down here,
come on down.
We're going to have a banana swale trench, mulch pit.
It's going to be like a long mulch pit
full of chunky organic matter.
It's going to all rot down and feed these bananas.
This works like a banana circle
except there's a long line.
One on that side.
One on this side,
banana circle here,
four banana circles there,
Two rows of pineapples,
one row of veggies and we've shut it all down
until we get a little bit more action
with a our new shareholders.
And we're going to show you how we do this.
We're scattering the mulch,
over is seed that we're just thrown out by hand.
It's the cover crop seed we thrown out.
And then we put a scatter mulch on it
a thin, thin layer of mulch.
So thin that it just covers the soil.
But if you give it a flickery of fingers
the soils exposed.
So that doesn't suppress germination
because it's not thick enough but it holds a moisture
and it stops a lot of birds eating the seed
and it allows the little bit of moisture held
in that thin mulch
to get the seed germinated and up it'll go
and you'll see the whole thing turn green.
Sam's here doing a rough mulch
and he's doing a rough rake
to shape up the beds
'cause we don't need it perfect.
We're just cover cropping this area.
We rake the pineapple beds quite well
and we're going to rework the veggie garden,
the one row with the sprinkler still in.
So we'll take you through this.
We'll throw, we'll put in different time lapses,
we'll put in different still shots.
We'll make it a little bit of a story.
So stay with us.
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Okay. So we've had rain,
and just a few days later not even a week,
we've got a green cover coming.
The cowpea is going to take over.
I'm going to show you what's,
what it looks like.
What's about to happen
and we're going to keep recording,
so you see the whole thing cover up.
Here we go.
Little bit of irrigation,
but quite a lot of rain.
And just in a few days, we've got germinating seed
especially where we've got scatter mulch,
look at it go.
So I'm going to walk across it.
I've got that mulch.
It's not going to make a lot of difference.
I'm not going to hurt it really.
You can see it coming.
It's germinating more in the sort of furrows
of our deep ripping,
but it's going to just even in the rises
there's germination here
and it's just going to take off
and it's going to cover everything.
It's going to ensure our crop.
And we're still working on the gardens,
extra little bits of and pieces
and trimming up around.
And so tidy this system up
but you can see here where we shape the beds.
There's a real thick germination coming.
And it's quickly becoming,
it's going to become just a green living mulch.
It's actually green manure.
We haven't mulch the garden bed
'cause we haven't covered it there
'cause we're going to actually put straw mulch on that.
We're going to tidy it up
and make that one really diverse garden for the volunteers.
We can see the pineapples.
They're going to have a beautiful green manure cover.
And as we go down,
you can see the thickness of it starting.
We've got our mulch banana swale at the bottom
we're still putting wood chip in there.
But we are insured by the living system.
We're insured by that green manure.
So we can take our time now
as we tidy up around the system
and make this a very easy garden to care for,
it'll be self fertilizing
and self maintaining for at least six months.
We'll keep you posted.
Well, here we are a few days later
and we're heading toward total cover.
So we're dominating the space with the plants.
They were originally just the seeds we threw out
the scatter mulch,
and now the complete germination,
and we're going to take over.
We are going to win the spatial race with the weeds
and that's what we want to do.
That saves us a lot of work.
And it's the most efficient way to get control.
I'm going to take you through
another little walk through the system.
You can see that we have cowpea dominance.
There is a little bit of grass coming through.
There's the dreaded nut grass coming through,
but there's no chance it's going to survive
in the amount of cover we've got here
because the cowpea,
each little cowpea can do,
oh five to 10 meters.
There's a little bit of arrow root coming through there.
No problem.
That's easy, easy mulch plant to have there,
comes out with a root division anyway
if you want it out.
So our rough end here is a little bit of sweet potato,
no drama there.
Our rough end has a lot more weeds
but it has a complete dominance of cowpea.
All those little cowpeas are fixing nitrogen,
they're all adding great organic matter to the soil.
Now actually I can see,
we may as well have a look.
I can see that where we came through
and cut the area.
The asparagus has come back through.
The asparagus has popped his head up.
So there's a row of asparagus here,
where we could transplant the corns
down into our kitchen garden.
So we haven't lost much at all
in our rough handling of this end
and over at the infrastructure end,
closer to the education center and commercial kitchen,
we've got a lovely control happening here
because we actually dressed the beds a bit more.
We made it a better germination condition.
We still haven't worked up
the one garden bed we've left.
The pineapples look happy,
this little guy stood his head up.
There we go.
So there come fully dominance with cowpea.
You can do this with any cover crop.
You can dominate the event
and win the spatial race with the weeds.
Then you can relax then you can relax
for up to six months while it takes its position
and come autumn and the start of winter,
in this climate it'll die out
and we can put in a winter cover crop
if we want to go another six months.
All the time increasing biomass,
all the time increasing fertility in the soil
because of the nitrogen fixing event.
What a wonderful thing.
Well, we've had constant rain.
In fact, it's still raining
and our cover crops are up.
It's just covered.
You can see a little bit of grass coming through
but it's not going to stand a chance
'cause the cover crop's going to go over it
get physically bigger, more vigorous,
and each plant is quite long.
So it'll completely smother this area
and our crop system at the other end,
which has still got the form beds.
That just looks picture perfect
because you've got this even cover of green manure,
fixing nitrogen all the way over the beds,
keeping it in a potential
to go back into cropping anytime.
Let me show you because this is a really good example
of how you can use cover crop
to actually hold fertility while you have control.
Okay. Just look at this.
We've got total domination with cover crop
controlled by rampancy.
It's kind of like my herbicide is my standby.
If in doubt, cover crop.
Don't have any bare ground? Cover crop.
Spoil the soil with the interaction
with a beneficial cover crop.
All those little roots are interacting
with microorganisms in the soil,
harvesting all kinds of beneficial elements,
particularly nitrogen
and acting like a living biological fertilizer.
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