Perennial Vegetables, Late Flowering Herbs and Autumn Leaves - The Polyculture Project

The polyculture study 2018 is over for the year but we are still active in the gardens during the autumn so I thought I'd continue the blog post updates on what we're up to.

But first just to let you know we've revamped our Online Store where you can find Forest Garden/ Permaculture Plants, Seeds, Cuttings, Bulbs, Rhizomes and Polyculture Multi-packs along with digital goods and services such as Online Courses, Webinars, eBooks, and Online Consultancy and finally we've added a Bulk Fruit and Nut Tree order form for Farms, Orchards, Nurseries, and Large Regenerative Landscape Projects. If there is anything in the store you would like to see but is not there, please let us know. We hope you enjoy the store and find something you like :) It's your purchases that keep our Project going. Thank you. Enter Our Store Here

Plants, Seeds, eBooks, Consultancy, Bulk Fruit and Nut Tree Orders for Permaculture, Polyculture, Forest Gardens and Regenerative Landscapes.

Aponia - The Market Garden 

We've had the first few overnight frosts in the gardens and this usually kills off the sub-tropical vegetables such as tomatoes, basil and squash, but the cold hardy vegetables continue to grow well. The broccoli really enjoy the autumn weather and should start to flower within the next month or so. Parsnips, carrots and kale are also unaffected by the cold nights and will continue to grow given warm day time temperatures that we often experience here. The misty mornings are a welcome change to the oppressive dry heat of the summer.   

The last of the courgettes, the first of the parsnips and butternut squash picked for the veggie boxes this week. We're also including walnuts, artichokes, apples, grapes, kale and parsley. 

Our perennial vegetable bed, a polyculture of Fragaria x ananassa - Strawberry  ground cover, Allium tuberosum  - Garlic Chives on the borders and main crop of  Asparagus officinalis - Asparagus has established very well this year and will be ready for the first of many harvests next spring. The feather like foliage of the Asparagus looks enchanting with the morning dew.  

Adjacent to the perennial vegetable bed we are growing a strip of Miscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus. These plants provide excellent wind protection and are a great source of biomass. We planted most of these from rhizomes last year and they have already reached over 2 m height in growth. Next year we will start to cut them regularly to provide mulch to the Asparagus plants.  

This is one of our White Mulberry cultivars planted in the spring. These cultivars have unusually large leaves having been bred for the sericulture industry. You can find out more about these amazing plants in our previous blog - Mo' Mulberry - The Essential Guide to all you need to know about Mulberry

Mulberry Cultivars

Although the Market Garden is well sheltered from the wind by the surround trees to the north of the site, our 9 year old Paulownia tomentosa - Foxglove Tree has shot up the last few years above the surrounding tree canopies and was promptly felled by the wind during a stormy night last week.   

Misty morning in the forest garden 

Wildlife In the Gardens

 Dylan found these juvenile Podarcis muralis - Common Wall Lizard.  These are primarily insectivorous lizards and from birth will seek out and feed upon insects such as crickets. They prefer rocky environments, including urban settings, where they can scurry between rock, rubble, debris and buildings. We have a number of rock piles around the gardens that these lizards take advantage of.

Ataraxia - Perennial Polyculture Trial Garden   

The Autumn color change is occurring a little faster in Ataraxia then in the Aponia and the home gardens and this due to the fact that the site is more exposed. Changes to daylight hours and the temperature in the Autumn trigger the plant to stop food-making processes in the leaves. The green chlorophyll cells, mainly responsible for the food making processes, break down and the green color disappears leaving the yellow/orange/red pigments to become visible. Plants, being incredibly efficient and very adverse to waste, extract many of the nutrients in the leaves before they are shed.  Here you can see the trees at higher altitude on the mountain tops already well into the transition and the plants around the Ataraxia starting to change color. If we don't have any strong winds within the next few weeks it's going to be a great spectacle.   

The Crataegus sp. Hawthorn in the hedgerows are full of fruit this year. These are edible but quite fiddly to eat and not particularly tasty. They provide an excellent source of food over winter for a number of bird species.   

One of my favorite local herbs is Origanum vulgare - Pot Marjoram. The flowering is still going strong as we approach mid autumn and these plants make an excellent late pollen/nectar provider to bees and other pollinators. 

Great to see Parthenocissus quinquefolia - Virginia Creeper making its way up the fence around the pond. We planted this in the spring with the aim being to soften the metal fence and provide some shade around the pond edges to reduce evaporation during the summer. These plants take a few years to get going but can quickly cover vasts area once they settle in. This Autumn we'll planting three Vitis vinifera cv. - Grape  vines on the fence on the other side of the pond where it is more accessible, along with a few Actinidia arguta  - Hardy Kiwi plants.

 Dylan, Archie and I have been clearing the area where we will be building a forest garden next month during our Design and Build a Forest Garden Course:1-4 Nov. It's approx 150 m2 area we will be working on that should host up 60 productive plants when fully planted -  really looking forward to this course! We still have 4 places available, should you be feeling spontaneous you can Register here.

Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course 

Want to learn how to design, build and manage regenerative landscapes?  Join us for our Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course from May 1st to Sep 13th, 2023. 

We're super excited about running the course and look forward to providing you with the confidence, inspiration, and opportunity to design, build and manage regenerative landscapes, gardens, and farms that produce food and other resources for humans while enhancing biodiversity.

Regenerative Landscape Design Online Course

You can find out all about the course here and right now we have a 20% discount on the full enrollment fees. Just use the promo code RLD2023 in the section of the registration form to receive your discount. 

We are looking forward to providing you with this unique online learning experience - as far as we know, the very first of its kind. If you are thinking of reasons why you should do this course and whether this course is suitable for you, take a look here where we lay it all out. Looking forward to it!

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We offer a diversity of plants and seeds for permaculture, forest gardens and regenerative landscapes including a range of fruit and nut cultivars. We Deliver all over Europe from Nov - March. - Give a happy plant a happy home :)

Our Bio-Nursery - Permaculture/Polyculture/ Regenerative Landscape Plants 

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Support Our Project 

If you appreciate the work we are doing you can show your support in several ways.

• Make a purchase of plants or seeds from our Bionursery or Online Store 

• Consider joining us for one of our Courses or Online Courses

• Comment, like, and share our content on social media.

• Donate directly via PayPal to balkanecologyproject@gmail.com or via FTX Pay

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Design and Create Webinars - Forest Gardens, Urban Gardens, Permaculture, Regenerative Farming   

We're hosting a range of online learning sessions including how to create habitat to enhance biodiversity, how to design and build a forest garden, polyculture design software tutorials, regenerative farm, and landscape design, urban gardening and much more. If you would like to be notified when our next sessions are coming up please add your email below and hit subscribe and we'll be in touch.

You can also register for our online training, services, and products directly here.

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The End of the Polyculture Study 2018, Aquatic Plant Propagation and Nut Harvest . Week 24 - The Polyculture Project

The Polyculture Study 2018 has now officially come to a close for the year, and we will be publishing the annual report and results by December.  Once again we have been supported by a truly amazing team of people, without whom, the study would simply not be possible. This year we have been able to work on two trials across two gardens, as well as developing a plan for a new garden Eudaimonia that we'll establish next year. So, our heartfelt thanks go out to ;Victoria Bezhitashvili, Angela Rice, Malcolm Cannon, Elise Bijl, Alex Camilleri, Daniel Stradner, Emilce Nonquepan and Ezekiel Orba.

You can find a Slideshow of the season here

Registration is open for next years study, so if you would like to join us visit here to find out more and to register

So here are some photos of what we've been up to in the gardens these last weeks,

Forest Garden

Fruits in the Autumn light are one of my favourite spectacles in the gardens. These Mespilus germanica - Medlar  will be ready to eat by the end of November. These along with Diospyros kaki - Japanese Persimmon are great winter fruits.

The Castanea sativa - Sweet Chestnut are excellent this year with plenty of triple nut husks. My neighbour informed me a few years back that if you want to grow Sweet Chestnut from seed you should wait for a bumper year when the tree is full of triple nut husks and select the middle nuts for sowing. These will produce the finest trees, according to Kiril, and I must say his trees are some of the best I've seen. The seedlings I reared using this method a few years ago are doing pretty well. As a side note, all sweet chestnut seeds should be sown when ripe. If you let them dry out they will not germinate.   

Here we have an old apple tree with Hazelnut - Corylus avellana 'Tonda Gentile'  in the under story. The hazel harvest is over now but even in the partial shade of the old Apple this three year old shrub is starting to produce some good quality nuts.  The old apple tree is one of my favorite producing delicious red juicy apples in late November. Unfortunately I do not know the cultivar.   

It's been a great year for Juglans regia - Persian Walnut  which is surprising given how wet the summer was this year. Usually wet summers encourage Walnut blight (a bacterium Xanthomonas sp.) For more info on Walnuts check out our previous blog The Essential Guide to Everything you Need to Know about Growing Walnuts - Juglans regia

We planted a few Juglans nigra - Black Walnut  in the gardens this year. Black walnuts have incredibly hard shells but are worth the extra effort so we're looking forward to trying those in a few years time. 

I found this wonderful Wolf Spider - Lycosidae while shoveling compost. These spiders are unique in the way that they carry their eggs. The egg sac as seen below is a silken globe attached to the spinnerets at the end of the abdomen, allowing the spider to carry her unborn young with her.

Biomass plants

One year old  Paulownia tomentosa - Foxglove Tree and Miscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus   grown from a rhizome last year in the garden beds. You can see why these plants are great for biomass production. To get a sense of the growth rate, the wooden stake you can see on the bottom right is at least 1 m tall. The Miscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus makes a pretty good low windbreak too, I'll see how well it maintains wind protection during the winter.  

Aquatic Plants 

I like to propagate aquatic plants in the Autumn, there is not really an optimal time to propgate these plants but I find them easy to deal with when they are larger with plenty of shoot growth. We are using the plants from our existing ponds to populate 2 new ponds. You only need a few plants to start off with as aquatic plants tend to grow very fast, and quickly fill out. In fact removing a 1/3 of the plants is necessary after a few years otherwise they can form a complete blanket cover in the water body. The aquatic plant biomass makes excellent mulch even when they are full of seed (the seed will not germinate in terrestrial habitat) For more on plants that are great for producing mulch check out our previous blog - How to grow your own mulch. 

Sagittaria sagittifolia - Arrowhead is a flowering plant in the family Alismataceae, native to wetlands in most of Europe from Ireland and Portugal to Finland and Bulgaria. These plants are extremely easy to propagate this time of year and you can also harvest the tubers which can be cooked and taste a little like potatoes but crunchier.

Sagittaria sagittifolia - Arrowhead are great for providing a later source of nectar/pollen for bees and other pollinators flowering right through September. 

I also divided the Typha latifolia commonly know as Bull rush clumps for relocation to our pond in Ataraxia. Another edible aquatic plant that has several edible parts that can be harvested for food during any season. I found this great web page about the edibility and other uses of this amazing plant  

Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course 

Want to learn how to design, build and manage regenerative landscapes?  Join us for our Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course from May 1st to Sep 13th, 2023. 

We're super excited about running the course and look forward to providing you with the confidence, inspiration, and opportunity to design, build and manage regenerative landscapes, gardens, and farms that produce food and other resources for humans while enhancing biodiversity.

Regenerative Landscape Design Online Course

You can find out all about the course here and right now we have a 20% discount on the full enrollment fees. Just use the promo code RLD2023 in the section of the registration form to receive your discount. 

We are looking forward to providing you with this unique online learning experience - as far as we know, the very first of its kind. If you are thinking of reasons why you should do this course and whether this course is suitable for you, take a look here where we lay it all out. Looking forward to it!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We offer a diversity of plants and seeds for permaculture, forest gardens and regenerative landscapes including a range of fruit and nut cultivars. We Deliver all over Europe from Nov - March. - Give a happy plant a happy home :)

Our Bio-Nursery - Permaculture/Polyculture/ Regenerative Landscape Plants 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Support Our Project 

If you appreciate the work we are doing you can show your support in several ways.

• Make a purchase of plants or seeds from our Bionursery or Online Store 

• Consider joining us for one of our Courses or Online Courses

• Comment, like, and share our content on social media.

• Donate directly via PayPal to balkanecologyproject@gmail.com or via FTX Pay

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Design and Create Webinars - Forest Gardens, Urban Gardens, Permaculture, Regenerative Farming   

We're hosting a range of online learning sessions including how to create habitat to enhance biodiversity, how to design and build a forest garden, polyculture design software tutorials, regenerative farm, and landscape design, urban gardening and much more. If you would like to be notified when our next sessions are coming up please add your email below and hit subscribe and we'll be in touch.

You can also register for our online training, services, and products directly here.

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