A Vegetable and Herb Polyculture, Five Layers from the Forest Garden and Summer Fruits - Week 19 - The Polyculture Project

With the forest garden churning out new delights and the successful hatching of broody duck number two's eggs, it's been a productive week here at the project.  The annual vegetables are flourishing and the first hint of autumn is in the air with the swelling walnuts. Welcome to week 19 - The Polyculture Project.

The forest garden continues to keep giving, with berries mainly giving way to figs, pears and cherry plums. The blackberries are the thornfree cultivar, yielding an abundance of juicy blackberries from July-Sep even under fruit trees in the semi-shade.  Being a vigorous plant, it provides a good amount of mulch material and/or animal fodder when pruning time comes around.   Check out our range of fruit and nut cultivars available from our nursery this season. 

Lupin - Lupinus polyphyllus grown from seed saved by Sophie's mum. This ornamental plant provides food for a range of useful pollinators, has good polyculture potential, and as with many plants from the Fabaceae family, can fix atmospheric nitrogen. In fact, Lupins are somewhat up and coming in this area, and although it seems more research is needed in this area, findings from this 2016 study are encouraging.

It looks like an excellent year for Juglans regia. Walnuts are monoecious, but the time the pollen sheds from the male flower does not always overlap well with the time of female flower receptivity to pollen. This condition is referred to as dichogamy. To overcome this problem growers can select another walnut cultivar (a pollinator) the male flowers of which open at the same time as the female flowers from the main cultivar. The pollinator should be situated upwind from the main crop. If you have other walnuts upwind from your site, as we do here, you should not have problems with this. 

If you are interested in finding out more about Walnuts, you can check out our previous blog posts here and here. We also offer a range of cultivars from our nursery and we are taking orders now for this autumn.

Cornus kuosa - Korean dogwood

Basil - Ocimum basilicum growing in our annual polyculture, Zeno

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!

Welcome to our Online Store where you can find Forest Garden/ Permaculture plants, seeds, bulbs and Polyculture multi-packs along with digital goods and services such as Online Courses, Webinars, eBooks, and Online Consultancy.  We hope you enjoy the store and find something you like :) It's your purchases that keep our Project going. Yuu can also find our full list of trees. shrubs and herbs for forest gardens on our website here 

 Enter Our Store Here

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

Photos from the Forest Garden 

Below is a labeled photograph of a 5 layer polyculture we have growing in an open area of our forest garden. 

The bulb layer cannot be seen as it has died off now and consists of Tulipa sp. - Tulip - Nectaroscordum siculum - Bulgarian Honey Garlic - Muscari neglectum- Grape Hyacinth and Narcissus poeticus - Poet's Narcissus. We're looking forward to planting some of our new Allium spp. into the available space this autumn. 

There is also a new layer that has emerged over the last few weeks - a third duck nesting in there with eggs due to hatch in 2 weeks or so :) 

A side note that you may find interesting. The Spartium junceum was reduced by approx 50% in early spring of this year and the regrowth has produced flowers that have just opened. Normally this plant flowers in early June. A second Spartium junceum I pruned at the same time that was in a more shady position did not produce any flowers.

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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Spring and Autumn Raspberries, Forest Garden Ground Cover, Summer Flowering Herbs for Beneficial Insects - Week 18 The Polyculture Project

This week, we are taking a look at some ground cover plants, experimenting with pruning Raspberries and thinking a bit more about beneficial insects and how we can categorise the kind of support they provide us with in our gardens. We also have some glad tidings to share from our feathered friends....welcome to The Polyculture Project - Week 18.

We've been experimenting with pruning the raspberries at different times of the year in order to try and prolong the fruiting period. The raspberries we did not prune from last season are producing their final crop (photo on the left) and the raspberries we did prune are just starting to flower (photo on the right). We're finding pruning half of the raspberries in the autumn is an easy way to get fruits from late May through to October. 

While on a road trip with my brother in the Rhodopes mountains 4 or 5 years ago, we came across a small landslide where several upturned plants lay. I rescued some of the plants from the pile and planted them under the relatively deep shade of a mature cherry tree in the home garden, seeing as the plants had come from a shady mountainside. 

5 years later, one plant, in particular, has done extremely well, that is Circaea lutetiana - Enchanter's nightshade. 

Circaea lutetiana - Enchanter's nightshade

Circaea lutetiana - Enchanter's Nightshade makes excellent ground cover in a woodland area.  You can see the ground cover below the cherry tree in this photo, where C. lutetiana it has established itself well while not being overwhelming.  This is probably because it is growing alongside other plants that prevent it from overtaking, including Dewberry - Rubus caesius. C. lutetiana is often considered a weed, but what's great about designing layers in a polyculture, is that when grown with other plants, the ability of a plant to spread and monopolize the area is greatly reduced.

Circaea lutetiana growing with Rubus caesius

Rubus caesius - Dewberry, another excellent plant for ground cover. One plant can grow to around 1m in width, thereby covering quite a large area. Lots of beneficial insects are attracted to the blooms, and the fruits are palatable and can be used to make preserves. 

We are always encouraging Heracleum sphondylium, commonly known as Hogweed, in our gardens. The plants grow at the base of fruit trees, among our  Rubus idaeus cv. - Raspberry. patch and in wild strips and islands throughout the gardens.  Part of the Apiacea family, this plant can grow up to 2m long, with hairy, ridged hollow stems. It's an excellent plant for animal fodder (the pigs and rabbits love the leaves), biomass production, and for attracting beneficial insects that feed on the pollen and nectar and use the hollow stems to overwinter. 

We speak a lot about beneficial organisms, so I thought it would be good to expand upon this term a bit. All organisms are beneficial, at the very least all organisms past, present and future decompose to nourish something else, but when we speak of beneficial organisms we are speaking of those organisms that provide clear and present benefits, specifically to our polyculture activity. Beneficial organisms, or Borgs as I prefer to shorten it, are a very decent group of organisms that make great partners in the polyculture landscape offering, as the name implies, benefits to our activity of growing the stuff we need. They seem to be happy to carry out these duties providing we supply (or at the very least don’t destroy) suitable living conditions for them, i.e, their habitat.    

The benefits these organisms offer come mainly in the form of increasing the productivity of our crops via pollination support, protecting our crops from pests via pest predation and providing fertility to our crops via their roles in decomposing organic matter and supplying nutrients, fertility provision.

If you're interested in learning more about the support Borgs can provide us within our landscapes, and how to attract them Week 9 of our Regenerative Landscape Design Course -  Working with the Wild, is available to purchase as a stand-alone module, or as part of our current online Regenerative Landscape Design Course.  Registration for 2021 is now open, and you can apply the promo code SUB2021 in the section of the registration form to receive a 25% discount. The offer is valid until the 15th of March 2021.

Welcome to our Online Store where you can find Forest Garden/ Permaculture plants, seeds, bulbs and Polyculture multi-packs along with digital goods and services such as Online Courses, Webinars, eBooks, and Online Consultancy.  We hope you enjoy the store and find something you like :) It's your purchases that keep our Project going. Yuu can also find our full list of trees. shrubs and herbs for forest gardens on our website here 

 Enter Our Store Here

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

Hibiscus syriacus - Rose of Sharon, flowering in the home garden. It's a beautiful shrub, that takes well to pruning and can be used as a very pretty hedge or a stand-alone ornamental.

Hypericum perforatum - St Johns Wort in flower in the nursery. A herbaceous perennial that giving the correct conditions will spread forming a very attractive drought tolerant ground cover. The plant has a long history of medicinal use and has established a place in modern medicine as a treatment for depression. 

We're thrilled to announce the first clutch of eggs have successfully hatched! The little ducklings not even a day old made a bee line for the pond and spent a happy hour diving into the depths before we moved them, and mother, safely into their house and secure area  We've lost very small ducklings before, so this year we'd like to try and protect them until they are a few weeks old and big enough to roam the gardens. For more on our work and gardens, and a video of the ducks, you can follow us on Instagram.

   

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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Forest Garden Ground Cover Plants, Parasitoid Wasps and Round Headed Leek - Week 17

It's been hot and dry the last few weeks with the more than occasional windy day that really takes the moisture away, so we've spent quite some time irrigating the gardens here, specifically all of the new trees and shrubs we've been planting over the last few years. 

Here are some photos from the gardens and what we've been up to this week.

It was a lovely surprise to find Celery -Apium graveolens growing on a bed nearby a water channel that brings water from a local mountain stream into the garden. It's a marshland plant in the family Apiaceae that has been cultivated as a vegetable since antiquity. I assume the seed has washed in with the water, a lovely surprise however it got here!

Cutting Celery -Apium graveolens

The Apiaceae family has some really useful edible and medicinal members, like parsley, parsnips, dill, fennel, and Angelica. However, it also includes the deadly poisonous hemlock, water hemlock, and poison parsley, two of which grow in our gardens, so exceptional care should be taken with identifying plants in this family. When the state of Greece turned against Socrates for his refusal to recognize the same Gods in 399 BC, he was sentenced to death by hemlock poisoning. Socrates apparently accepted this judgment rather than fleeing into exile and willingly drunk the Poison hemlock - Conium maculatum mixture which would have likely resulted in his death caused by respiratory failure.

Jacques Louis David -  The Death of Socrates

One plant that is highly edible and worthy of a place in any landscapes is A.sphaerocephlon -Round-Headed Leek, the last Allium to flower out of the new collection we introduced to the nursery this year. It's a beautiful plant, as with other Alliums a perennial bulb, growing to 0.6m in height and to Europe including Britain. Although quite tolerant of different soil types, heavy clay soils should be avoided with Alliums. They really seem to thrive in open, sunny positions in well-drained soil. A.sphaerocephlon is fairly drought tolerant and is hardy to zones 4 - 8. Elegant egg-shaped flowers that turn from green to purple as they ripen bloom in July - August and are really quite something special.

                                  

           A.sphaerocephlon in the Allium nursery

Uses: I have seen a photo of this Allium growing with mixed grass species and the effect was stunning. Bulbs could be interplanted in this way near an annual vegetable plot to encourage useful pollinators. A.sphaerocephalon would also suit being placed in another polyculture with other flowering perennials such as Lilies. Can be grown in gravely soils or rocky areas of the garden, and highly ornamental when planted in groups of  10 - 15 bulbs. Should not be grown with legumes.

Edibility: The bulbs reportedly make a great onion substitute and like the other Alliums listed, the leaves are delicious in salads, as are the flowers. Although no specific mention of medicinal uses has been seen for this species, members of this genus are in general very healthy additions to the diet and are thought to reduce cholesterol and improve circulation.

Biodiversity: Striking purple blooms that are known for attracting bees, butterflies​/​moths, birds and other pollinators.  The whole plant is said to deter insects and moles.

 

                                             Highly attractive to a range of Beneficial insects

Propagation: Bulbs should be planted 10cm deep in the autumn for emergence the following spring.  Once clump forming, can be divided in the spring. Round-headed leek is easy to grow.  Plants often divide freely at the base.

We are offering more Alliums in our Bionursery, and you can order an Edible Allium multi-pack from our click to buy page here. Plants and bulbs will be sent out in the autumn, but you can order now to reserve your plants as we have a limited supply.

We've been looking at how to work with the wild the last few weeks as part of our Regenerative Landscape Design Course. One of the exercises was to identify some pollinators, pest predators, and decomposers and Ani Daw, who is taking the course, got a great photo of a Parasitoid Wasp at work on Aphids attacking Broad beans in here vegetable garden. Here is Ani's slide from her exercise with some more information on this Parasitoid wasp. 

Here are a few other observations I've made in the gardens this week: Cotton Lavender - Santolina Chamaecyparissus - The aromatic leaves can be used when cooking as a pleasant flavoring.

Fruit forming on a Sorbus.sp. I sowed this tree from seed 8 years ago, and the fruits make a nice nibble in early winter when they soften up after a frost

. 

Welcome to our Online Store where you can find Forest Garden/ Permaculture plants, seeds, bulbs and Polyculture multi-packs along with digital goods and services such as Online Courses, Webinars, eBooks, and Online Consultancy.  We hope you enjoy the store and find something you like :) It's your purchases that keep our Project going. Yuu can also find our full list of trees. shrubs and herbs for forest gardens on our website here 

 Enter Our Store Here

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

Male European Stag Beetle - Lunacus cervus. Always a pleasure to meet them in the summer.

 Ajuga reptans - Bugle has really attractive foliage with bronze tones and is a great ground cover, adding some diversity to the shades of colour within this layer. Reptans means creeping (like a reptile), and it grows at a medium - fast rate mainly by growing surface runners that root at intervals along their length. forming a fairly dense carpet of foliage quite quickly, and smothering out weeds as it goes. It's also excellent to help with soil erosion. Bugle has quite an extensive history in herbal medicine, particularly to stop bleeding where a tea was made and applied externally. Flowers are small, blue and highly attractive, lasting from April to June and pollinated by bees and the Lepidoptera family.

Ajuga reptans - Bugle adding some contrast to the ground layer

A fritillary butterfly resting on some Bugle plants in the nursery. The caterpillars of these butterflies can be pests to certain crops, but the butterflies are also the prey of other useful pest predators

Speaking of pest predators, here's a simple key to things you can do to actively encourage and keep beneficial organisms, specifically invertebrates within your landscapes;

• Don’t use any -icides, organic or non-organic 
• Integrate plenty of densely planted support polycultures that flower throughout the year and include evergreen species 
• Have undisturbed areas for wild plants to grow 
• Leave dead herbaceous plant growth to overwinter
• Provide other microhabitats for nesting and overwintering
• Use a large % of native plants as well as exotics that may extend flowering periods
• Provide a perennial water source
• Keep soils well mulched and undisturbed

Archie's been busy weeding, irrigating and mulching the bulb nursery recently. The onions that we're growing in the wooden raised beds seem to be doing better than in our traditional raised beds that aren't constructed with wooden sides, but built up originally using a chicken tractor and supported on the sides with the wild marginal plants. I think the success is probably due to the fact they are being grown in a patch formation polyculture, which likely suits onions better, as in a mixed formation they will become shaded out pretty quickly by plants occupying the upper canopy, such as the tomatoes.

Archie weeding the bulb nursery

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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