- Hi, Geoff Lawton here.
Early morning, it's day two on the farm again
and I'm in the kitchen garden
and this is a little video
about intense small space gardening.
This is not a small kitchen garden,
this is a large kitchen garden
but it's got a lot of small space design
that I'm going to run you through
so you can see how much production
you can get out of a small area,
how intense it can be,
how easy it can be,
how diverse it can be
and how you can hold the fertility together
so it just gets better all the time.
Let's have a look.
It's easy to put together
these really diverse, intense garden beds
with masses of variation in there,
flowers, vegetables, herbs,
it's ginger here we're going past,
all kind of salad greens,
and whole mixtures of stuff
and still have perennial over story
in this climate like papayas.
This little garden is going to be put in
with just cardboard paper, really thick,
mulch, really thick, say 150 to 200 mill
and then little pockets of compost
and you can just really mix and match.
It doesn't really matter.
So, you just make all the holes
and fill in with a diversity of seedlings or seeds.
You have a great bit of mix of vegetables
and when you want to plant something like carrots,
you just make a long slot,
put in sand and compost together
'cause they like a sandy mix
and plant your carrots
as a long line
but most things can just go in little pockets
of compost and what doesn't germinate
or doesn't work as a little seedling,
you just transplant something else in there.
You're imitating a forest floor
with the way you're planting a vegetable garden.
Perennial spinach actually grows continuously,
no season, this is Antheria Sissoo,
a fantastic addition to a garden,
little parsley edges.
Always great addition to edge pluck
in a garden to a foot path.
Spinach, perennial, grows continuously.
Great to put on the end of a garden,
like Brazil spinach,
just grows from cuttings.
Papaya and Tamarillo.
There's some climbing now involved.
Shading a watermelon,
it's going to be edge planted into a garden.
Tomato and cucumber cages,
just round wire cages.
Just sheet net,
so your tomatoes just come straight up the inside,
the cucumbers go over the top
and shade your summer tomatoes
which often boil on the plant in this climate.
Around the outside we've got basil, a companion.
Tomato cages can turn into absolute rampancy.
So, they're almost out of control
at a certain point
when you're just oversupplied
with pick all the way round the cage.
This is just to be grown rampantly
as a seed crop across the garden
and then the ones that don't get picked,
go to seed and seed the garden again.
Tomatoes grow with marigolds
as a good companion
and lettuces grow with tomatoes as well
as a good companion along with basil.
So much color, so much shape,
the occasional flowers,
different forms, it's so confusing to pests.
You really don't have many pest problems at all
when you cram in so much diversity,
so tightly spaced.
But we need to look at fertility.
How do we hold the fertility up?
Because you don't need to worry
about rotational planning too much.
All you have to do is keep fertilizing the soil
and that comes down to a few basic elements
but somewhere there has to be a base fertilizer.
And that base fertilizer we need to make ourselves
with the minimum of inputs,
so we have all kinds
of thing in position, particularly compost.
Now here we have a large number of compost
being made 'cause we have a large garden
and a lot of people to feed
and we're training people to do this.
Right at this end we have finished compost
and I'm just going to unwrap one here underneath me.
There we go.
That's pretty much a finished compost.
It could go a bit further,
it's got a few chunky bits in it.
But it's starting to look like soil
or forest, humus.
And we've created that like this,
just by turning
and let me run you through the process
at this end.
I've got to capture this this morning
otherwise we'll be finished.
And at this end we have some cages.
You only ever need one cage
if you have the room
and this one demonstrates it quite well.
Got a set of layers here,
so we've got brown material
and it's shredded or broken down into small sizes
and that's probably what's growing
the mushrooms outside actually,
see the mushrooms.
We've got brown material, green material and manure,
brown material, green material, manure, brown material,
green material, manure all the way to the top
and particularly the brown material's slow to break down
so you need to increase the service area
by chopping it up
and this is a really simple way to make compost
if you have the room,
only if you have the room.
So, you make up a case like this,
you clip it together.
We've actually used dog clips here.
Simple sort of way of clipping it together
and split rings on the other side
so it's kind of hinged
and we leave it in here
for just one week.
One week later return it,
so that'd be a Monday,
it's been a week in a cage,
then on a Monday it turns
and then again on a Wednesday
and then again on a Friday.
So, it's three turns, Monday, Wednesday, Friday
for three weeks and it's done.
That's what's happened all the way down here
and at the other end you've got the result
that I showed you at the start.
It's that simple.
One week in a cage, turn Monday, Wednesday, Friday
for three weeks
and it's all over.
One month later you've got one cubic meter,
almost exactly the same volume you started off with
to fertilize your garden.
One of the best fertilizers you can possibly use
and I'm just going to show you
what we do with our urban tractor.
It's a very basic deep litter system
we've got here at the moment.
I'm going to show you how we get at least one cubic meter
of compost out every two weeks.
So, this is our little urban chicken tractor.
It's a compost tractor
and it's all made out of recycled materials.
We made it with the farm workshop,
all the little doors and things
but it's very basic
and covers 16 square meters in total.
It's two meters wide and eight meters long
and this is the chicken house.
Harriet and Rudy are inside emptying out the deep litter.
We've got a little bit of a cucumber vine,
kind of gourde, tall cucumber growing on the outside.
We've recycled a couple of shed doors here
and this is the material coming out
and that was just mulch.
So, that's just paddock mulch there
and it's been in the tractor here
for about two weeks.
I think we're going to get about what?
Six wheelbarrows you're getting out?
- [Harriet] Yeah, at least.
- [Geoff] At least six wheelbarrows.
And this is pretty high grade material,
so if I go in, we've filled it up right up
to these tin edges.
It was that much full.
We've got this set up
so we've got a little auto waterer here,
so the chickens just peck in here
and they get their water
and it goes to a little 20-liter jug
that's on the outside.
We've got it covered with a planter bag
and that stops it getting algae.
Got a little recycle tin can here full of grit,
so they've got their grit
and we've got a bit of shade cloth from the outside
'cause we're in a hot climate in the summer
and right now we've locked 'em
into the roost
and they just have a flat roost here,
some recycled 20-liter drums at the back
for nest boxes.
The door that's closed them in there is the door
that closes the manure receptacle mulch under neath.
There's a concrete slab there,
there's a door at the back that opens
and this door that also closes the chickens into the roost
comes down and closes off this lower section.
So, the chickens don't get to this,
they just drop all their night manure,
goes through onto this mulch,
so this is very rich in manure.
We lock 'em out
while we change the system,
so they're locked into their roost
and we've got a little dust bath in there
with some sulfur in it
so that they don't get chicken mites.
I've got one rooster in here
'cause we do incubate these eggs
and we've got a basic wire ramp
that we put up
so they can get in and out on the ramp.
We're going to fill this back up,
we're going to take out that bottom material as well.
We can take it out on either side.
Pretty simple.
We're just about empty now.
Really doesn't take up a large footprint,
so I'll just come through, guys.
There we go, simple way you can fertilize
your home garden
and out the back here,
I have a little door.
Simple little door, little latch there.
That just opens up to our nest boxes
which we're about to refill with straw,
so that's how we get our eggs out.
Have another hinge door here.
There we go.
That opens right up here
and I'll just latch that on,
so that's the door that goes right into the back
of the manure collection from the roost.
That goes straight through.
I've got a door on either side
of this roost manure collection
and there's a concrete slab here
so we can clean it all off.
So, that's very high nitrogen material there.
That'll be coming out pretty soon.
We can put it directly on plants
that love high nitrogen
or we can put it through the compost cycle
and it will fast track our compost.
Now if you don't want to keep your chickens
in there all the time,
you want to given them a bit of a free run,
you can set a little pen up outside,
either a temporary net fence
or you can have a little area set up
so you can just open doors
and let them come back out again.
So, now our material's going up to compost.
So, Harriet's going to take this up to our composting area
and it'll sit in a cage for a week
and then it'll turn every other day
or at least three times a week
for a month and come out as high grade compost.
And here we go, Rudy's stacking it back up.
This has been sitting around getting wet
in the rain, so it's already getting a bit warm
but it's really just grass clippings
off the fields, off the paddocks
that we're throwing back in
and by the time we're finished,
it'll all be full up to that level of the tin,
almost 300 mill, one foot high almost,
right the way through
and underneath the roost as well.
Two weeks' time, we do it all again.
And we've got a free chicken fertilizer factory.
Simple worm farms like bars
with a bucket under neath work really here.
Here you have a shade cloth over the top
of the worms themselves
and because we've got rainy season,
a sheet of iron
but often there's not room for some systems like this
in a very small space.
Here's a bucket, it's actually a plastic flower pot
sunk into the middle of a herb spiral growing bed
but these are working vegetable gardens too.
And it's going to be filled up with compost,
food scraps and then some worm food in the top
and then a bird bath put on top of that.
So, here we've got the sub pod
which is a manufactured system
and it works perfectly
and actually keeps all flies and maggots out.
Just lift the cloth there.
We've got a little cloth
and a geo fabric
and underneath we've got the food scraps
that we add and you can see the worms there.
This is a very tidy pre-constructed system.
There's no mess, there's no smell
and it interacts with the garden
and the garden fertility very well.
So, you can see around the outside
we've planted brahmi
which is reasonably hard to grow in this garden
but here it's grown really easily
with the fertility of the sub pod, a great addition.