Thinning and Lifting in the Forest Garden, Biomass Plants and Garden Wildlife Week 11 - The Polyculture Project

It's been a productive week in the gardens and we've been busy chopping and dropping, digging water channels and pruning. It's starting to heat up in the gardens now and the fruits are ripening.

So here's what we've been 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 - Forest Garden Maintenance 

We have a combination of fruiting shrubs and trees planted along swales in the Forest garden including Rubus fruticosus cv. - Blackberry, Ribes nigrum cv.- Blackcurrant, Aronia melanocarpa - Black Chokeberry and Prunus cerasifera - Cherry Plum and Chaenomeles speciosa - Jap. Quince. The plants generally grow well together but over time the dense entanglement can reduce air circulation within the mixed canopy that can start to create stressful conditions for the plants, it also makes it difficult to harvest. To remedy this we practice thinning and lifting. Thinning is basically removing approx 1/3rd of the oldest wood within each shrub. We also remove the dead wood and any branches that are rubbing against each other. Lifting is removing the lower branches of the trees to above head height in order to access around the tree and provide more light and air flow under the canopy. All of the pruned material are chopped into smaller pieces and applied to the surface under the shrubs. Here are Lilly and Lea (in the thick of it) thinning the shrubs and trees on the Swale.  You can see the lifted Prunus cerasifera - Cherry Plum to the left of Lilly 

Forest Garden Fruits 

The first crop of Rubus idaeus cv. - Raspberry are ready. These fruits form on the unpruned canes from last year. The pruned canes will produce fruit around late September 

It's another good year for Prunus spinosa - Sloe. The shrubs are full of fruit that will ripen in late summer.

Ribes rubrum cv. - Red currant are starting to ripen

Lavandula angustifolia - Lavender and Ribes rubrum cv. - Red currant

The meadows around the area are ready for a hay cut. The lack of a long dry period this spring has prevented a cut so far this season.  

Birdsfoot trefoil - Lotus corniculatus is one of many nitrogen fixing herbs that grow among the grasses in the meadows

Wildlife in the Gardens 

I found what looks like the beginning of a wasp nest among the stack of straw bales in the garden. 

We have a growing population of Grassnakes - Natrix natrix in the gardens. These are harmless snakes that can be useful pest predators feeding on slugs when they are young. This is the first time I have seen these snakes in the nursery area of garden. It was among the potted plants probably hunting for frogs that shelter among the pots looking for slugs. For more information about this snake check out Dylan's website Bulgarians Reptiles. 

Biomass Trials - Ataraxia

An ideal biomass/mulch plant grows fast, is drought tolerant, competes minimally with crop plants, does not contain seed that easily spreads, is easy to handle and cut, i.e,  not thorny/prickly or tough and fibrous, and can biodegrade relatively quickly (thereby returning the nutrients back to soil). It should also be inexpensive to produce lots of plants and easy to establish. We're experimenting with various plants in the trial garden to see which plants are most suitable for mulch production.  You can find out more about our biomass trials here.

The following are photos showing patches of Paulownia tomentosa - Foxglove Tree , Morus alba - White Mulberry and Miscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus.

Out of these three plants Miscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus  is certainly the easiest to propagate with a plant grown from a rhizome being able to produce up to 5 more plants within a year. Some care should be taken when choosing the location of the  Miscanthus x giganteus - Giant Miscanthus  as the plant spreads rapidly forming large impenetrable clumps. We plant on raised beds and mow the pathways aorund the beds to keep them contained. Here is Ronan dividing clumps of Miscanthus x giganteus for planting around the pond in Katalêpsis -The Polyculture Study Guest House. These plants are also useful in producing support material for vegetables in the gardens.

For more on growing your own mulch see our previous blog post - How to grow your own mulch 

For the Bulgarian translation of the blog see here - thank you Mihaela Tzarchinska.

 

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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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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