So here's what we've been up to this week.
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| Plants, Seeds, eBooks, Consultancy, Bulk Fruit and Nut Tree Orders for Permaculture, Polyculture, Forest Gardens and Regenerative Landscapes. |
Ronan Delente a chef who has been travelling the world cooking across the continents has joined as for the study this year. Ronan has been experimenting with various recipes using the wild plants and perennial vegetables from the gardens. He started a blog this week to share his recipes and love for cooking with perennials. Check out his Falafel recipe here - looks very tasty!
The Forest Garden - Aponia
It's going to be a good year for plums it seems especially the wild Prunus cerasifera - Cherry Plum that grow in abundance in our area. These plums are great, each wild tree has unique tasting plums and I reckon about 1 in 10 have the perfect amount of juiciness, sweetness and acidity that I love in these fruits.
Mespilus germanica - Medlar is flowering. This is seedless local cultivar and provides us with great fruit from late November into December.
Looking forward to the fruits from this Rubus fruticosus cv. - Blackberry cultivar 'Reuben'. This cultivar is unusual for blackberry in that it produces fruit on new growth, known as a primocane. We get some great fruit from this plant in the summer and it continues to flower into late October and although the fruit does not ripen that late in the season the flowers do provide scarce forage for pollinators.
As the warmer season approaches we will be needing to irrigate the gardens. This week we went for a walk up the mountain to show the team the source of our irrigation, the river in the valley above us, and how the town diverts the river to supply water for gardens and farms in the area.
Here's a map showing the channel we use to irrigate the market garden and home garden on the west side of town . The red markers are places where the stream can be diverted to irrigate the other gardens of the town. The end of the blue line in the bottom left hand corner is the market garden. The above photo was taken at the other end of the blue line on this map.
For the East side gardens we use a different river .
I spotted the first flowering Chamomile of the season. This is one of our favourites to collect and dry for a supply of herbal teas. The first time I collected chamomile I was confused in trying to identify the plant . Browsing through herb books to look up the herb I found many names, both common and scientific. First of all the word chamomile is sometimes spelled camomile then there’s Roman (or English) chamomile, a perennial, and German (or Hungarian) chamomile, an annual. The German species might be listed as Matricaria chamomilla, Chamomilla recutita, or Matricaria recutita. Roman chamomile is referred to in some sources as Anthemis nobilis, in others as Chamaemelum nobile. I wrote a blog post years ago to help with identification. You can find it here if you are interested
Paulownia Coppice Trials
We've been experimenting with growing Paulownia tomentosa - Foxglove Tree in the garden. Our experiments include growing the plants in the center of our vegetable raised beds for shade and mulch, growing the plants for tipi poles, fence posts and stakes in the vegetable gardens and generally to see how much biomass these plants can produce in the polyculture garden.
Here is a photo of Paulownia tomentosa - Foxglove Tree used for shade support in our vegetable polycultures. This photo was taken in the summer of 2016 just 3 months after planting the 1 year old whips, already providing some nice shade that helps preventing the parsley from bolting to seed.
This photo shows the trees after planting in 2016 and then in the summers of the following years.
This spring about 3 weeks ago I cut down the trees and the largest tree (shown below) was approx 4 m tall and approx. 15 cm wide at the base. You can see 3 weeks after I cut the tree the new growth is already emerging. I expect these new shoots will reach at least 1 m tall by the end of the season. I'll post some photos in the future.
Here's a photo of some of the pole wood we harvested from the two beds. We used this wood to stake the tomatoes and the thinner diameter wood for bean poles. The larger diameter wood is not shown here and will be used for fence posts at some point.
Based on some trials with coppicing paulownia in the home garden, I expect much faster growth from the coppice stools than from the original whips we planted.
Bees in the Gardens
Xylocopa violacea, the violet carpenter bee is one of the largest bees in Europe. These solitary bees hibernate overwinter and emerge in the spring, usually around April or May. The female creates the nest alone. The eggs are laid within a series of small cells, each of which is supplied with a pollen ball for the larvae to feed upon. The adults emerge in late summer then hibernate until the following year They hibernate in dead wood boring tunnel in the material hence they are called "carpenter bee" and they will use the same nest of abandoned nest if available, a good reason to leave some old logs around the garden.
Honey bees are loving the Allium schoenoprasum - Chives in the nursery. These bees were moving very slowly over the flowers, almost as if they were drunk on the nectar.
Kale we sowed last year and harvested all of last summer and through the winter is flowering at the moment. Not all of our kale survive the winters here (winters can be very harsh), but there is a patch in a protected spot that does well. Kale is a biennial plant the life cycle of which span two years. They flower and produce seeds in their second year after which they whither away. You can keep the plants alive for many years by cutting back the flowering growth but I like to let some plants go. As you can see below they are extremely attractive to a range of bees and other pollinators. For more info on plant life cycles see our previous post 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.
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Regenerative Landscape Design Online Course
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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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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
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