Welcome to our fourth Polyculture Profile in our series , the first and only annual polyculture that we will be publishing here. During this post, we'll go into the details of how to grow this herb and vegetable polyculture that can provide a reliable harvest of beans, basil, tomatoes, courgette, butternut squash, as well as marigold and calendula flowers for herbal teas from June - October.
It maybe helpful for you to look over this Polyculture Profile Layout post before or after reading the profile, where we provide a description of the profile layout and some general notes to consider, should you wish to try to grow the polyculture yourself.
Polyculture Name - Zeno - Annual Productive Polyculture
Compatible climate (KCC): C - D (B with irrigation). Zeno is particularly well suited to a warm temperate/ Mediterranean climate. As a general guide if you can successfully grow tomatoes outside in your garden you can grow Zeno.
Water needs: Irrigation required for optimal production.
Light preferences: The polyculture requires at least 8 hours of light per day. The hours of sunlight do not need to be consecutive as long as you have both morning and afternoon sun that adds up to eight or more hours, the polyculture will grow well. Positioning the polyculture on a west - east axis will allow the highest amount of light capture in the polyculture canopy.
Soil preferences: Fertile loam
Suitable pH: 6 - 7.5
Layout: Island - row - belt
Intro
Zeno is a warm season herb and vegetable polyculture that provides a reliable harvest of beans, basil, tomatoes, courgette, butternut squash, and marigold and calendula flowers for herbal teas from June - October. The polyculture also provides habitat to a range of invertebrates, birds, reptiles and amphibians, and can be grown along with free ranging ducks.
Overview image
Species list
Plant selection
Zeno consists of 11 tomato plants (a different cultivar is usually planted in each bed) on the edge of the raised bed for easy picking and to be in close proximity to the water when we flood irrigate. The tomatoes are tied to round wood hazel and alder stakes approx 1.5m high and 6cm diameter. In between the tomatoes we plant 11 basil ‘Sweet Genovese’, which are reported to have a happy relationship with tomatoes in the garden as well as the kitchen. Beans are grown up wigwams forming large clumps of vegetation dripping with beans and flowers that tend to clamber onto the surrounding plants by mid summer. The beans can potentially supply their own nitrogen via an association with rhizobium bacteria that inhabit the soil.
Crawling along the ground and between the plants are winter squash. The broad leaves from these plants shade the roots of the other plants and reduce the emergence of volunteer plants.
We’ll also include a courgette or bush scallop at the ends of the bed that have a more compact growth pattern than the climbing squash.
French and African marigolds - Tagetes erecta and T. petula are sown throughout the bed in order to repel and confuse pests. They also attract hoverflies, the larvae of which feed on aphids and the flowers can be used in teas and salads.
Wild volunteer plants are encouraged to grow around the edge of the bed and I’ve counted around 15 different species emerging throughout the year. These plants help stabilize the soil edges of the raised bed and may provide a buffer between the tender young crop plants and the slugs and snails. They also provide habitat and forage for beneficial insects, providing a source of mulch by simply chopping and dropping the plants before they produce seed.
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Functional components
The polyculture consists of four main components:
Productive plants
The productive plants include the main vegetable and herb crops: tomatoes, summer squash, beans, courgettes and basil.
Support plants
The support plants include Marigolds and Calendula - Calendula officinalis, both self seeding annuals.
Micro-habitat
The stakes and bean supports provide perching sites for birds, the thick straw mulch provides sheltering habitat for lizards, frogs and toads (in the spring) and the wild plants that grow around the bed edges provide a source of pollen and nectar in the early spring and late autumn, and possible sites for invertebrates to overwinter, seeing as we let them grow undisturbed from October - late March. The self seeded native plants often consist of edible salad crops during the spring and autumn such as lamb’s quarters - Chenopodium album, common mallow - Malva neglecta, chicory - Chichorium intybus and plantain - Plantago major.
Animal integration
We successfully integrated chickens and ducks into Zeno.
Chickens - we used chickens to originally establish the beds and they integrate very well in this warm season polyculture. In the early spring when the temperatures are warm enough for the chickens to be outside during the night, we placed a 1 x 3m bottomless chicken coop with 8-10 hens inside onto one half of a bed. The chickens lived there for three or four days and each day we threw them in kitchen scraps, grain and weeds. The chickens relentlessly scratch among the soil and mulch picking off the eggs of slugs and larvae as well as pupae of various arthropods. They also forage for seeds in the soil and thereby reduce the emergence of volunteer plants in the bed. The chicken's scratching mixes up the organic matter we throw in daily and the birds contribute a valuable supply of droppings as they go.
Chickens located on one half a raised bed in early spring a few weeks before we start planting
After three or four days we moved the chickens onto the next half of the bed and the process repeats. The area the chickens have just moved from is forked over, soaked well (or we wait for rain) and usually 20L of compost per 1.5m length is applied i.e. 80L per bed). A 20cm layer of straw mulch is then laid to cover the surface. After the first frost at the end of the season all of the vegetables in this polyculture will die off and at this point we would bring the chickens back to rummage around the crop residue and soils for a few days. None of the plant material is removed from the beds. What the chickens leave behind is cut into small pieces and applied to the surface as an overwinter mulch. In November, garlic is planted into some of the beds. November sown garlic will normally mature in June, however we use the small bulbs that are not worth planting as main crop garlic and harvest them in March like spring onions before the chickens go on, providing some nice fresh vegetables in early spring.
Ducks are much more hands off than the chickens and can free range within the beds all year without bothering any of the crops included in this polyculture. I have noticed that ducks will eat peppers (leaves and fruits) and corn seedlings, so for certain polycultures it’s better to have either the growing area fenced off or the ducks fenced away from the plants. The ducks do a pretty good job at keeping the pests down in Zeno, and although they do rummage through the straw bringing some of it into the pathways, it’s easy enough to rake the straw back on the beds every few weeks and the job they do at eating grubs and slugs is probably worth the trouble. In the below photo you can see the ducks swimming in the flooded pathways between the annual polyculture beds.
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Polyculture benefits
Perhaps one of the chief benefits of Zeno is that it does not require annual rotation. We have grown this polyculture on the same spot for almost nine years with good results, although we do shift the positions of the crops within the polyculture each year, e.g. the tomatoes will go where the basil were planted and the bean tripods will change places with the squash. It’s relatively pest free, the only pest we have is the southern green stink bug.
Pests
Southern green stink bug - Nezaria viridula is attracted to tomato plants and feed just under the skin of the ripening fruits. The damage caused by these insects has been great enough in some years for us to declare them a pest. They also seem to be attracted to French beans, with the feeding from the bean sap resulting in contorted and stunted bean growth. They start causing problems in late summer, but keeping an eye out for them in July when they are in 1st-4th instar (developmental) stages and removing them from the plants works well, and if done really well can reduce their occurrence in following years. We’ll bring a jar with us when harvesting or tying the tomatoes to collect the bugs and then dispose of them.
We’ve not really had any significant crop damage from any other pests although the beans and squash are vulnerable to slugs and snails when the seedlings are emerging and before we had the ducks we’d sometimes lose a few to them. The stakes provide perches for a number of birds that hunt insects within the bed and also serve as snail traps. Snails will retreat up trees after a night's feeding in search of a shady nook to shelter from the coming sun. The snails climb the stakes expecting to find the shade and are easy to spot and remove in the morning.
From 2014 - 2019 we recorded the inputs and outputs for this annual polyculture. If you are interested, you can find the description and results of our studies here
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