Plant pots, hedges and human learning - or not...

Faced with plastic engulfing the planet and my feeble question at the garden centre as to why plants can't be put in small cardboard, decay-gradually-into-the-Earth type pots being met with a shrug and a 'people won't pay for an alternative to plastic' response, I was reduced to near tears of wonder at the sight of this...

A small maize plant - two actually, in a recycled cardboard pot as sold by our local bio store. All the plants in the shop were happily growing in their snug little pots, and yes, they were probably more expensive than yr average plastic 'godet' but I reckon most people might be willing to pay an extra few pennies to know they weren't adding to the local 'let's pretend we're going to recycle your plastic' landfill/burning operation, and that they might be supporting a company interested in protecting what environment we have left... 

                                            Our very contented potato plants in their mulchy bed

After watching many permaculture/food forest Youtubes I've taken to building 'Buttes' or mounds of compost, hay, leaves, grass cuttings, etc as an experiment to see what likes being encased in a mulch rather than exposed to climatic ravages in bare earth - and it is bare here currently, far too little rain. Our neighbour farmers are busy ploughing with vast tractors, watering in wind and sun at the hottest part of the day and perhaps wondering why everything dries out so much - could be to do with the fact that there are virtually no hedges left... in fact, I was reading about an environmental activist living in a shed on a remote Scottish island who recalls his first stirrings of nature-demise incredulity were as a kid when he heard that farmers were paid to dig out hedges.

There is the sight of small (very small) movement here - the local councils awarding grants to farmers to put hedges back in... we live and learn, possibly.

Leaving things alone

For years I've been attempting to hold our garden back from its natural urges.... It wants to be a half acre of weeds.
Not meaning to sound as if I am a control freak sort of gardener; not in the slightest, but come each May I do usually zip around with a small strimmer to get rid of what we perceive as weeds.
I can recall my mother ranting about ground elder in vicious terms, in fact it's edible apparently; if she had known she might have looked on it rather more fondly.
This year after reading so much horrific stuff about declining biodiversity, lack of bees and our general lack of understanding about the damage the human race has and is continuing, at an alarming rate, to inflict on all other lifeforms, I decided to leave as much as possible alone.
All weeds, or rather, plants that gardeners generally label unattractive or invasive, have been left to do their thing, and I have just cut tracks through the swathes. Of course there are a few plants, such as Japanese Knot Weed, that I might have attempted to keep well at bay if we had it here but so far nothing menacing has encroached.
The birds are noticeably more in numbers, which could partly be due to lockdown meaning verges all around were also left alone. Insects are everywhere, and the trees that usually get attacked by various blights are looking healthier. In a vague (and I want to vastly improve on this) nod to Permaculture I have mulched everything like mad, even using shredded bank statements and the vegetables are looking stronger than when I previously turned the earth and cleared away weeds.
It's all an experiment to be developed but our small patch of the world certainly feels more alive than any other year so far.

 

                        

   

Our resident collared doves second nest of the year





Tomatoes and potatoes with bank statement mulch.

Postscript: I've just been down the garden to empty the compost bin and noticed a certain (don't know the name) vine that I usually pull off the laurel bushes is covered, and I mean covered, with honey bees...



 

Permaculture and making soil

As an antidote all the crushingly depressing news surrounding us on all media, I opted for re-exploring the subject of Permaculture; something I find fascinating and hope-inspiring.
A few Youtube videos later I felt encouraged to attack our summer parched garden. I'd already made heaps of cuttings from various attempts at an autumn cut-back and had been considering where to have a large bonfire without setting fire to any trees.

Supposing I didn't do a bonfire, let alone several? Or drive a car load of green stuff to the tip.

After watching one truly amazing gardener dumping all his green vegetation along with cardboard, paper, kitchen waste, pine needles, etc etc, I emulated this - not very correctly - but with what I had.
The idea is to not disturb the soil by much digging and turning but to add moisture and rotted down plant material so that you actually leave new soil to develop as the debris gradually breaks down.

The more serious Permaculturists - if that is a word - do a lot more preparation than I did; one guy driving to his local forest, felling semi-rotten trees, hauling them back and burying them in trenches and then covering it all with grass cuttings, leaves, compost, etc, etc.

In a piece he had prepared earlier (hello, Blue Peter) he planted young lettuce plants within the foliage mulch and you could practically see them starting to grow enthusiastically. His garden was a truly beautiful tapestry of plants, vegetables and fruit trees. Ours is a windswept, ragged thing with some nice bits I've managed to keep watered enough over the very long, hot dry summer. It'll be an interesting experiment to see if my mulching attempts bear fruit, or at least potatoes bigger than marbles.

Another film I saw was called Greening the Desert. Geoff Lawton 's extraordinary project has taken some of the driest desert spots in the world and has turned them into living, green spaces. The before and afters are incredible: literally sandblasted areas of rock made into functioning food-producing gardens. So, if it can be done on an inland desert I should be able to improve our Southern France patch of land.

A step in the right direction

I've been listening to a lot of talks lately about farming practice and Permaculture, partly in relation to  my own research for writing about a speculative world in 2070, and partly because of the amount of information revealed to us all everyday about how we are - through overuse of pesticides, petrol-based fertilisers etc - basically killing the surface of our one and only human home - and I'm not one of the folk who think we'll just piss off to Mars when this globe's kicked us off.
Therefore, I was really excited to find on one of my favourite dog walks up in the hills that some enterprising and sensible bod had introduced their flock of sheep and lambs into a huge area of vine fields - fenced off and patrolled by one of the calf-sized sheep dogs of this region, the Great Pyrenean hound, or Patou, in local speak.
What could be more sensible? The sheep eat the weeds - usually treated with roundup or some similar poison, (weeds, not the sheep) and then the animals crap thus fertilising the soil . . . It's beautiful in its simplicity and a joy to see rather than some tractor grunting up and down the striped fields spraying clouds of death-juice into the atmosphere.