It is fruiting!īehind is more rocket (we know it will have to go) mixed with spinach plus an autumn sowing of Mizuna and Mibuna that have gone to flower, comfrey and some rogue red clover. On the back wall is an own root espaliered peach tree grown from stones given to me by Achim Ecker from ZEGG ecovillage in Germany. I keep the greenhouse for them along with peppers, basil and other tender herbs and potatoes in pots in winter. I don't bother to grow tomatoes outdoors unless they are a tough Siberian variety. This is increasingly hard to judge with climate change. We will also grow squashes and courgettes, French beans and sweetcorn but we delay planting these until we are sure the bad weather has passed.
It fixes nitrogen, swelling the garlic bulbs and increasing yields, and also means we have little weeding to do in Summer. This is undersown with clover in late Spring. There is also another bed with Isle of Wight garlic (Solent White, and Elephant which is strictly a leek). Just an idea! Underneath this is a layer of compost and if any small salad plants pop up I will leave them be. I hope that as the beans grow they will shade the chard and prevent it bolting. I like the juxtaposition of the colour of the leaves and stems of the chard (red only in the picture but we have vibrant yellow too) with the broad beans’ flowers and pale green leaves. Next we have a bed of broad beans and rainbow chard. Beneath all this riot of plant life is another layer of self-seeders, mainly American land cress, corn salad, salad burnet and other edibles that have been saved from the weeding hoe. Then follows autumn sown rocket gone to seed plus an asparagus bed that is hidden but in production with some Isle of Wight garlic popped in a corner.
It has a mild garlicy flavour and can either be cut at ground level after a couple of years and eaten or cut like chives in the summer months. Babingtonii), a native British perennial allium that produces bubils from its flowers that you can sow as individual 'seeds' or you can divide the bulb. Mixed within it are Babbington's leeks ( Allium ampeloprasum var.
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The lead photograph shows one side of the vegetable patch with spinach in the foreground mixed with red clover, originally sown for its nitrogen fixing properties, but wonderful forage for bees and other insects. It is entirely organic, vibrantly healthy (we just have to net out the cabbage white from our greens) and it has a feeling of wildness that I love. What has resulted is a riotous polyculture which is low maintenance, seems to robustly cope with hail and late frosts in May after unseasonal warmth in March and heavy rains in April. Ox-eye daisies and opium poppies have seeded all over the mulched paths and I can't bring myself to re-establish order so I am spot weeding out the grasses, docks and dandelions and leaving the flowers be. Mixed up with annual veg are self seeding salads, a few perennial veg that have not been transplanted to the forest garden, green manures and as many flowers as nature wishes to provide. We sow winter vegetables in August, eat them well into late Spring, pull out what has gone over or hasn't worked well and make room for spring plantings. Our one third acre garden started life as a permaculture design on paper before it was made, but 20 years later Tim and I are erring more and more on letting nature take its course and as well as experimentation.
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