 |
 |
The Site Specs
Köppen Climate Classification - Dfc borderline Cfb
USDA Hardiness Zone: 5b - 7a
Latitude: 42°
Elevation: 574 m
Average Annual Rainfall: 588.5 mm
 |
| Ataraxia - Forest Garden - before and after |
 |
Want to learn more about Regenerative Landscape Design? Join The Bloom Room!
The Bloom Room is designed to create a space for more in-depth learning, for sharing projects and ideas, for seeking advice and discovering opportunities.
Ultimately, it aims to build a more intimate, interactive, and actionable relationship between members, a way for the Bloom Room community to support each other’s projects and learning journeys, and to encourage and facilitate the design, build, and management of more regenerative landscapes across our planet.
What you can expect as a member of the Bloom Room
As a member of the Bloom Room you can expect;
Access to an interactive forum where you can ask questions, direct what type of content you would like to see as well as share your own content and projects.
Monthly live session featuring general Q&A and tutorials on design software for creating and presenting polycultures.
Live session every month for members to showcase your projects, plans, designs, and gardens, with guest speakers from the community.
Full Access to all of the content on Substack
A 50% discounts on all of our online courses
Future opportunities to join our Global Regenerative Landscape Design and Consultancy Service, with potential roles for those with the will and skill to join our design team.
An opportunity to take part in the group ownership of a Regenerative Landscape. You will find more details on that here.
Become a paid subscriber to our Substack to join. The annual subscription is currently $70 and the monthly subscription is $7 (monthly subscription excludes discounts for products and services) . You can join here, we look forward to meeting you!
Climate Survey
We start with the climate survey that helps to define the boundaries of our options. The kind of information we are looking for here is as follows:
Botanical Survey
 |
| Some of the amazing polyculture that already exists on the site (photos from spring- summer) |
Here's a list of some of the existing plant species from this site.
In all of the perennial polycultures I design, my intention is to retain all of the existing species and to add more edible/productive plants along with fertility/support plants to assist them. More often than not many of the plants already growing on your site will be edible, medicinal, attractive to wildlife and fascinating organisms that are well worth getting to know.
Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course
Want to learn how to design, build and manage regenerative landscapes? Join us on our Regenerative Landscape Design - Online Interactive Course. We 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.
Soil Survey
The soil test covers the below:
1.GROUND COVER - What is covering the surface of the soil
2.PENETROMETER - How easy is it to penetrate the soil
3.INFILTRATION - How quickly the soil drains water
4. DIVERSITY OF MACROLIFE - Quantity of visible soil organisms present on the surface
5. ROOT DEVELOPMENT - How the plant roots are distributed throughout the soil profile
6. SOIL STRUCTURE - How the solid parts of soil and the pore space between them are arranged
7. AGGREGATE STABILITY - How stable is the structural arrangement
8. EARTHWORMS - How many
9. LAB ANALYSIS - pH - the mineral content of your soil
 |
| Katrin, Andreas and Frances Making the soil test. |
Apart from Lab Analysis, all of the tests can be carried out with materials you will likely have around you. This soil test, when repeated each year, is a great way to track the progress of your soil overtime and to see how your methods are increasing or decreasing the health of your soil. The tests were developed by Northern Rivers and you can find full instructions and more info here.
A quick intermission just to let you know about 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. It's your purchases that keep our Project going. Enter Our Store Here
 |
| Plants, Seeds, eBooks, Consultancy, Bulk Fruit and Nut Tree Orders for Permaculture, Polyculture, Forest Gardens and Regenerative Landscapes. |
Cadastral and Topography Survey
After lunch we were back on site for the cadastral survey, to mark the perimeter of the design area and to make a topography survey in order to gain an understanding of the shape of the ground i.e where it slopes, high points and low points etc.
Cadastral - In this case the boundary for the garden was defined by existing features of the site, i.e, a hedgerow to the west, a main access path to the east, the property boundary to the south and an overflow swale for the main pond to the north. When marking the boundaries of the design we made sure to include a 1 m wide pathway around the entire area.
The corners of the plot were staked and we measured the distance between each corner with a measuring wheel taking note of each distance between each point in order to recreate the design on software later. You can also do this with a very accurate GPS (RTK based) and an orthophoto (an aerial photograph or image geometrically corrected such that the scale is uniform and corresponds to the GPS data).
A standard smart phone GPS and google earth do not provide anything of practical use at this scale. For a multi hectare plot they are adequate to gain a general impression.
Topography Survey - Next we embarked upon the topography survey
 |
| Using a transit level we established the contour lines on the site and measured elevation distance from the highest to the lowest point of the site. |
We found we have a mild slope from the North to the South and towards the East. Given that we have an irrigation channel to the west of the garden this meant that we could arrange irrigation channels and planting patterns to take advantage of gravity to irrigate all of the plants on the site.
The irrigation channel design we choose determined the layout of our access which in turn provided us with a number of subdivisions within the plot.
That's all for this post, and in How to Design and Build A Forest Garden - Part 2 - Creating, we will look at how we selected plants for the design, the rationale behind our plant placement , how we prepared the site for the work to begin, how we established the irrigation channels, pathways and planting zones for the plants, our planting out techniques and how to manage the garden.
If you enjoyed this post please leave us a comment and a like and even better share it with your friends on social media. The more our articles are shared the more likely they are to appear in search engines and the further we can reach people with our message and grow our project.
Support Our Project
If you appreciate the work we are doing you can show your support in several ways.
Become a member of the Bloom Room. A $70 annual or $7 per month subscription to our Substack provides you with access to live sessions, design tutorials, a members forum and more, see details here.
Make a purchase of plants or seeds from our Nursery or Online Store
Joining us for one of our Practical Courses or Online Courses
Comment, like, and share our content on social media.
If you appreciate the work we are doing you can show your support in several ways.
Become a member of the Bloom Room. A $70 annual or $7 per month subscription to our Substack provides you with access to live sessions, design tutorials, a members forum and more, see details here.
Make a purchase of plants or seeds from our Nursery or Online Store
Joining us for one of our Practical Courses or Online Courses
Comment, like, and share our content on social media.
Thank you for sharing your work. This type of journaling is essential to the scientific process, and I would like to see your work repeated many times in many places.
ReplyDeleteThankyou Jude
DeleteI go through from here the post and find some useful content. Thanks for making being part of this post.. Keep sharing!
ReplyDeleteشركة صيانة خزانات J0p8lGOaJW
ReplyDeleteشركة عزل اسطح cIA3DaGNwI
ReplyDeleteشركة مكافحة حشرات imsJno8K5g
ReplyDelete