A garden you can build anywhere - Episode 37
Good afternoon patrons
We hope you all had a wonderful Easter break with family and friends. We had the pleasure of seeing both our immediate families and plying the nieces and nephews with plenty of chocolate before handing them back to their parents!
Please enjoy our latest video where we take you through the steps of building a lasagna style garden using Australian gardener, Esther Deans' techniques. Her book has been an invaluable resource to us on our gardening journey so if you are interested in grabbing a free copy you can do so using the link below.
https://soilandhealth.org/copyrighted-book/esther-deans-gardening-book/
We are really pleased with the results in our keyhole beds and hope that our newly renovated winter bed will be just as successful.
The rain gods finally blessed us with rain yesterday afternoon and this morning. We are looking forward to greener pastures on the Ramshackle Ranch. I am about to don my wet weather gear and harvest some of the remaining summer crops to hopefully avoid any onset of rot. Troy's younger sister is still in town and has offered to help me get some preserves underway this afternoon as the produce begins to pile up around us.
Another Troy edit this week that was just as enjoyable for me to finesse with sound, music and cutaways as his first piglet video.
With gratitude
Troy and Pascale
Comments (13)
Troy is doing a great job on the videos, and this was a very informative one. Thanks!
You guys are just a wealth of knowledge & we have learnt so much over the years. Cheers 馃嵒
The joys of 'just having a crack at it' 馃槈
Enjoyed that immensely. I have used variations of that in Texas with success. I'm going to install some square foot gardening
By coincidence, we are also wanting to explore square foot gardening techniques. We are satisfied with this style of soil creation, but that way of spacing looks pretty effective. We have beds at the community gardens, and the neat appearance of SFG would fit well there.
Fantastic! I will be reactivating some raised beds this year that were left fallow the last few seasons. I think I will use a modified version of Esther's technique when I do. I played with it once before with good success, but it has been years. Thanks for the link to her book! You two make a great team on the editing chores! Thanks for bringing all this to us in spite of Fertility Ranch getting the better of you ;)
Our tomatoes grew quite well on two layers of straw and manure without the lucerne, so experiment is the name of the game. We have some trees that are 'feral' here, and I would like to use them as a base layer as they are leguminous and look like they would break down fast. The weedless aspect of no tillage is a massive time saver to busy folk and I feel like I have, 'matured' into working less!
Great video! This could come in very handy as food prices increase. And I enjoy seeing the diversity in your garden and your obvious satisfaction; so, I may give it a try...
Some crops, like Potatoes, could probably be more economically bought than grown, but we are persuaded by the superior flavour. Tomatoes, peppers and other foods that are not stocked are definitely winners though.
Really interesting ideas! Thanks for sharing the link too! Going to have to try this on our thin island soil! Take good care!
Have a look in the book where she takes an old bed frame and tarpaulin as a base. By using a 4" layer of seaweed, she built this garden as a raised platform for wheelchair gardeners. Lucerne might be hard to source where you are but I think any leguminous tree would perform well. We have tagasaste, a tree from the Canary Islands that seems it would answer. It's all a bit of an experiment right now but seems to be productive.
Good job Troy on video editing! Another lovely video. Love seeing the progression of your garden. It seems like a really effective method for growing a luscious garden even in an area with very poor soil, like I have here in north Texas. I have a large yard which would be a perfect place to experiment with this type of gardening. Now I just need the energy you guys have!
We are quite astounded by how quickly this style of garden produced a surplus! Not having to weed the garden is a great boost to morale too. If you do follow the link to the we book, Esther talks about making this garden on a plastic sheet over a bed frame. Basically it is the same thing but on a 4"base of seaweed instead of cardboard. I think this would be great over sand or as a raised bed.