(soft music)
- I'm showing you a
new project happening at Homemakers, in 2021 starting
and sort of triggered a bit by this.
When we made this new bed for
the video with Kevin,
of Epic Gardening in San Diego, California
last November, 21st November last year.
And this is the last bit of space we
had a Homemakers sort of wild ground.
I wanted a bit of wild ground actually
hedge to make a new bed.
No dig, compost on the weeds, coupled around
it's been successful.
It's nice growth there,
even though it's been winter time since we made it,
I've been looking at this field
and the opportunity came up to buy it
just to Christmas last year,
a couple of months ago.
So I did, and it's all happened really
much more quickly than I thought it might've.
And so now I have nearly an acre
almost 4,000 square meters to think about
what to do with
and also this bit of ground now
which is used to be the periphery of Homemakers
and is now the middle
it's suddenly become a middle is so funny.
And there are things that like these apple trees
I've never really come to terms with them.
They're all actually very nice apples to eat.
There's three trees here,
which were put in by my predecessors maybe 30 years ago
and I'll probably get them out.
I'm hoping I can get Jack,
my son here with his digger
to do the digging to remove them
and also perhaps help remove some of these brambles,
although it's kind of nice to have a wild hedge
it's cause it's not an hedge anymore it's a middle.
I'd like to have more prats and edible hedge here
or something like that.
I don't still how it's all happened very quickly.
And I'm not kind of person who makes brand plans.
So this is very much an evolving project.
And I'm kind of having this discussion with you here
thinking out loud in many ways
because then when you come back to a later video
you might find something different that has happened
to what I just said so fair enough.
I like to be in a place and feel it
and do some things
and then see how that feels
and then carry on from there rather
than having a sort of plan to work to.
Just ideas. I've got lots of ideas
that's the main thing.
Like here we caught the remains
of that was a hedge, an edge hedge.
Now, of course, it's been
in the middle again of that amelanchier
it was very pretty
flowering hedging plant mini tree.
This was a heap of big soil here
came about as a result of building the cabin,
that really nice cabin space.
And under there, there's no concrete foundations.
It's just sitting on pillars of wood in the ground.
And I thought, well, since it's there
and we're not gonna use that ground,
so I got to dig it to dig out the soil, which went there.
We've used a bit in making compost
and the rest were using on heresy.
You know, I hadn't thought about that,
but that's how it's turned out and it's going good.
This was all really wild here
is massively bramble and bindweed.
There's a lot of bindweeds.
and with no dig again,
mulching and repeat pulling as well.
We've pretty much got rid of most of the bindweed here
that's very satisfying
and there's a lot of bindweed here.
So this is the new,
well, the new acre,
and we're not going to crop an acre or anything like it.
This is just the start.
I just don't want to crop a huge amount,
more ground too quickly.
There's, a lot of aspects to that.
And you've got to scale up everything.
I'm employing a new worker actually,
partly to help with all the other work
we're doing education work
and YouTube and so on.
So it's gonna be a bit of a year of change this year.
And here, the growth is quite
strong you can see the, the weeds, grass,
cow parsley, wild carrot
and a stinging nettles around the hedge
a lot of brambles.
And in the middle,
I'm doing the same approach of no dig
where you cover the ground.
Like you can see here with
compost mainly compost on top.
There's a bit of the soil underneath
and a bit of cardboard along the edge.
If we just see this
some compost you can see that, for example.
So we put cardboard first
then the compost, then soil, then some compost.
And I'm very pleased to see how most
of the grass seems to have died.
They will be there a lot of bind weed.
I know there's bindweed.
I saw it last summer a lot
and that doesn't appear until about May.
So we'll see how we go with that.
And here also, this is a big sheet of polythene
I got from Jack actually and
we only put it on four days ago.
So four days ago,
that was all just green grass.
And it's what is going through mulch
because with his tractor,
he cut the grass it was very tall.
And that's made a lot
of dead grass like hay on top, which is fine.
And the crops will grow through that.
But here we put soil on it
because at the time I didn't have enough cardboard.
We now have enough cardboard actually.
But the soil is like cardboard if you like,
it's an initial smothering there.
And then we'll put the cardboard on top
and then some compost to finish off.
So it's that side of things is all
taking shape pretty nicely
and it's actually surprisingly quick once you get going,
you know if you've got a bit of polythene
a bit of cardboard
the polythene won't be here for very long.
It's a temporary phase.
I don't like using a lots of polythene
and probably there's quite a few slugs under there.
Probably some leather jackets in the soil.
So pass gonna be an issue.
This is a bit of a wildlife Haven here.
There's rabbits, deer,
badgers last autumn we had badgers
it was the sweet corn for example.
There's a wood just beyond this.
It's quite well done.
It's that's, what's so nice about it in many ways,
but the the rabbits is an issue
like they're currently making holes
in this compost heap, for example.
And this is a heap I had delivered.
There's about six tones there
to give you an idea of how much
three loads or two tones.
Mostly green waste compost up
this end which is very black.
And then there's some mushroom compost there,
and I'm doing a weed killer test on them
with some beans that I've sewn into it,
just to see a
the power of the weed killer,
hopefully come out negative.
So that area is around 260 square meters
covered ground that we're going
to crop this year, all being well.
And that is an increase
of around 25% on what I'm cropping at the moment.
And for me personally, that's quite a fast enough rate
of increasing other people would do more.
I've done more before in my youth,
and we're now passing an area where there's
going to be a pond we hope.
We have to get planning permission for things here.
And so that will go in front of
the planning committee with our design
and the area shown roughly by the sticks there.
Everyone around here can have an opinion
on it and say something
and hopefully it'll pass.
So that's a pond with an Island.
And then in this corner,
finally I'll show you roughly where,
so right here actually there's gonna
be quite a big shed well, quite big is
four and half meters wide, nine meters long
and that's about 15 feet by 30.
So that'll be nice wooden structures
a little bit modeled on my compost bay design.
This is a design.
I've done myself as usual on this back of an envelope.
It's very informal and then turned it
to something a bit nicer.
And the builder works on that.
And so, yeah, that will be,
I hope quite different we got
to get permission again for the shed.
And I look forward to showing you around here
sometime in the spring.
It's late winter night, 20th of February
the very last day of winter.
The weather's quite nice as you can see
but still very variable
spring is starting to happen.
So our spring unfolds,
we'll come back here at some point
and have a look, see how the progress has gone.
(upbeat music)