i have been growing vegetables for over
two decades starting with a very small
space in an urban back garden
and every year since then i've learned a
lot about growing vegetables and about
the many issues related to small-scale
food production
sometimes i'm really delighted by how
well some of the vegetable plants grow
even though my standards and
expectations have gradually been
increasing but i also wonder why i still
haven't figured out how to deal with
some of the key issues after all of
these years
one of the excuses that i make is that
i've chosen to try many different things
experimenting with different types of
gardening and methods
and of course i only have so much time
and capacity
but this red gardens project is also
very fertile ground for learning and
every year i learned more and more
and 2021 was no different
most of the gardens that we grow in are
organized in either rows or fixed beds
which makes planning and providing
appropriate space for the diversity of
crops a lot easier
but i have struggled with finding a
suitable organizing system for the more
integrated planting focus of the
polyculture garden
last year i decided to divide each of
the wide beds of this garden into a grid
of clusters each of which was designated
to grow a single plant or a cluster of
smaller plants which would grow beside
clusters of other unrelated crops
this clustered method of mixing crops
works better for me providing a flexible
system for organizing and keeping track
of all the plantings
and it is producing better results which
opens up a lot of opportunities for
exploring the benefits and issues of
this more integrated planting strategy
sometimes the seeds we sow in the
gardens don't grow very well and i have
wondered how much of this is due to the
poor seed quality so i decided to do a
germination test on most of the seeds
that i have in my collection
it was interesting to see how strongly
and quickly some seeds germinated how
others were quite slow and only
partially germinated and how some seeds
didn't germinate at all
some of the seeds i know were really old
including seeds i saved over a decade
ago and i think some of them suffered
from not being kept in ideal conditions
whereas some of the older seeds were
surprisingly strong
but some seeds i purchased less than a
year ago did not germinate at all and i
wonder how old these seeds really were
i've grown climbing beans for many years
but i never tried growing the bush bean
versions of this popular vegetable
last year i had the great idea of using
one of the beds in the large polytunnel
to conduct a trial of lots of different
varieties of bush beans
but lacking experience with this type of
plant i didn't realize that they also
tend to need support and most of the
plants ended up falling over although we
were still able to harvest a lot of
beans the task of harvesting was a lot
more time consuming than it could have
been and a lot of the pods degraded when
they were in contact with the soil which
made the yield comparisons between the
varieties less reliable making it harder
to select varieties to grow again
we have been managing the beds of a
larger polytunnel with a no dig method
adding a substantial layer of compost
onto the bed each season and leaving it
on the surface rather than digging it in
but the compost that we added this year
ended up drying out in places
due in part to the quality and type of
compost that i bought in but mainly
because of the uneven watering patterns
from the sprinklers and my lack of
attention
once it dried out the compost actually
repelled the water in some patches
causing it to flow over the surface of
the bed to drain through a crack or less
dry section
these dry patches caused very
inconsistent germination of the direct
zone seeds leading to delays and reduced
harvests from the spring crops and some
of the compost remain dry and
unavailable for the soil biology and
plants for a lot of the season
for most of the years in the gardens i
have generally made do with equipment
and materials i could salvage or reuse
i was happy to avoid buying things that
were not necessary and like to be able
to make do with what i could find
locally but this often cost me more time
and effort in the gardens
last year i bought a big roll of
biodegradable twine that a lot of
professional growers use
as well as a load of clips and hooks
specifically designed for hanging crops
although there are costs limitations and
issues with these materials all of them
saved a fair amount of time and made
some regular tasks a lot easier and we
no longer had to pull out plastic twine
before composting the vining crops
i used to leave most of the stems that
grew on the eggplant or aubergine plants
allowing these plants to grow into their
natural form as a multi-stemmed bush
but i have not been impressed with the
amount of fruit that was produced in the
past and the plants were hard to control
and suffered from a lot of mold
last year we tried a very different
strategy of planting them closer
together pruning off all of the side
shoots that formed and training them up
a piece of twine hung from the
polytunnel structure
the plants were easier to manage growing
surprisingly tall seemed a lot healthier
and produced more in the same area than
the bush method
especially with a hybrid variety that we
grew
as part of the setup for a large
permaculture course last summer i had
the opportunity to build a temporary
outdoor shower with the water heated as
it flowed through a pipe buried in a
compost pile
i was pleasantly surprised by how well
it worked and interested in how a system
like this can be adjusted by changing
the types and proportions of materials
used the volume of compost and the
length of the pipe in order to
accommodate different uses
but i also realized this exploration
that when a compost pile is very hot
removing some of the heat can actually
help to speed up the rate of
decomposition by reducing the
temperature to a level more hospitable
for the thermophilic bacteria
as part of the exploration to boost the
yields of the intensive garden i
constructed plastic covered cold frames
to provide a warmer microclimate for
several crops including the bed of
squash
and the plants definitely grew faster at
least at the start of the summer quickly
filling the space of the frame but then
the plant seemed to overcrowd it and did
not produce as big of a yield of squash
as in the past when they were grown
without the cold frame
i think this might be because they were
growing the same number of plants but
the added shelter allowed them to grow
too big too quickly and ended up
crowding each other out
so this year i will grow fewer plants in
the same protected space to see if that
works better
the garlic we grow in the polytunnel is
consistently bigger than the same crops
grown outside
last year in the outside garden we
planted the smaller cloves produced
outside as well as the slightly larger
cloves produced in the polytunnel
the plants grown from the polytunnel
cloves seemed to grow bigger which was
expected but they were also more delayed
in maturing or seemed to grow for longer
of the season before starting to develop
the underground bulb
it seems that growing the garlic in
warmer conditions one year for planting
outside the following year could be a
strategy for getting a significantly
larger crop even if i'm not sure why
this would cause a plant to continue to
grow for longer
every year i try to encourage the
ladybird population to develop in the
polytunnels occasionally bringing in
bugs i find outside in order to help to
deal with the abundance of aphids that
tend to appear in the late spring
this season the ladybird population
seemed to be missing despite the
abundance of aphids on some of the
plants
but shortly after i put up a netting to
prevent the blackbirds from getting into
the polytunnel and digging out the
compost of the beds there was an
abundance of ladybird larva eating the
aphids and eventually a fantastic mix of
this helpful insect at all stages of its
life cycle
and a while later after taking the
netting down the number of these useful
insects dropped considerably and i
strongly suspect that one of the local
bird species perhaps the tiny iran has
developed a taste for the ladybirds
which is apparently not uncommon
last year i finally replaced pallets
with more appropriate panels that i
built for containing the compost piles
which worked much better
but i still had to find a way to deal
with the backlog of a load of old rotten
and wet pallet wood
because the wood of the pallets was not
treated i thought i would try to dry
them for burning and i built bins to
store the cut up pieces of pallets while
they dried
i used fresh pallets for the base and
walls to let the wind blow through and
with a plastic covering the top and the
self-facing front to speed up the
process
and i was surprised how quickly even the
soaking wet pieces of wood dried in the
moderate amounts of sun and abundance of
wind that we get here in ireland
and i think this drying ability can be
quite useful in other tasks in the
gardens
we put up a new polytunnel last year but
preparing the soil was delayed by the
discovery of the buried remains of the
edges of plastic from a large polytunnel
that had blown down on the site a number
of years ago
we were obviously frustrated that the
negligence of the previous occupiers of
this area was delaying planting and
requiring a lot of unanticipated work to
remove the deeply buried plastic
but it got me thinking about my own
interventions in the landscape and how
most of us don't really put much thought
into what will happen in the future
i'm trying to be more aware of finding a
balance between establishing and
building things that benefit us and this
current project and recognizing the fact
that someone will likely have to clean
up my mess in the future or to have to
work around what i may be leaving behind
the work in the gardens has been largely
unaffected by the very unusual events of
2021 including the global health crisis
and thankfully we haven't experienced
extreme weather or social upheaval
locally
but i have become more observant of how
the biases that many people seem to have
can significantly influence their
understanding of what is really going on
and can shape their opinions and actions
although very different contexts i see
this both in how people respond to these
global events and how people approach
growing food and their opinions relating
to different methods we might use in the
gardens
of course i am no different and my
biases definitely get in the way but i'm
glad to have a project like this where i
need to work to set aside some of these
biases and really try to understand what
is happening with the different methods
we are exploring
and i feel that this practice in the
gardens is helping me to better identify
and understand the biases that are
influencing how i and others are framing
the events and trends in this crazy
world
throughout all of 2021 i had a lot of
help in the gardens from chris a friend
and neighbor who is working with me on
this red gardens project in order to
gain experience in growing food
and all of the work that she does in the
gardens has been a huge help which
thankfully will continue for 2022.
having someone else do work on this
project like this does require a fair
amount of training as well as explaining
what needs to be done and why there are
differences in the methods used which
all takes time
but this process really helps me get
better at being able to articulate
different issues and ideas and in some
cases this discourse allows me to gain a
much better or deeper understanding into
what is actually going on
all of which helps
i have been uploading videos to this
youtube channel for over five years now
and the positive feedback has been
wonderful
the number of views this collection of
videos gets rises and falls with the
seasons and with the occasional really
popular video but as it has
progressively increased each year until
this past year
i've not really figured out why the
engagement in this channel has plateaued
over the last year or so
but continuing to make more videos and
trying to upload on a much consistent
frequency will probably help which is
what i'm planning to do
but i wanted to thank all of you from
around the world who have subscribed to
this channel and have continued to watch
and engage with my videos
and a special thanks to those people who
financially support my work through
patreon and paypal as this continuing
support has been essential in allowing
me to continue for the year
if you would like to join them please
follow the links on the screen or in the
description below
but most importantly thank you for
watching
you