RESTORE NATURE NEWSLETTER

May 2025

Dear gardeners

I'd like to bring up an issue today that may seem a bit of a no brainer, but it helped me reduce my gardening work massively. My mother's garden which is only tended once a fortnight presents a stark contrast to my own garden in which daily work of several hours just never seems to catch up with what needs doing.

I believe its an issue in a permaculture garden that doesn't neatly fit any of the 12 principles, or receive enough attention. Perhaps I'm wrong.

One of the most important things to do in your garden is to ensure sufficient capacity to be able to smoothly accomplish your main tasks. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, not having enough capacity for your main tasks can be a huge design failing that is easy to overlook while distracted by other things like polyculture and companion planting that seem more interesting. However without sufficient space for your tasks, you are constantly squeezing activities and projects into a space that is too small. This can be hard work and involve much unproductive time. My aha moment came when I managed a garden with sufficient capacity. What a difference it made and how easy maintance became without the constant juggling.

The thorn branches are left for years under trees until they are dry enough to be burned or trampled to form hugel beet beds. I needed more capacity for drying out thorn branches but also for composting. And this designated space is what my mother's garden had in abundance.

In her garden I organized things so that plant material could be moved around and moved only once to its final destination. In my small garden I had too many spots which were compromises in terms of location. They were temporary spots and before I could put the areas to a new use, lots and lots of painful clipping and brush removal were required.

I've now made a large area for storing thorn branches out of the way of garden activities. It is next to a very large garden waste composter made of pallets of which the capacity is about 4 cubic meters or more.

Sometimes increasing capacity can be about increasing speed. I've installed a metal bin brought from the old place for all the kitchen waste and its so quick to use compared to lifting the mustard coloured carpets you see in the mid ground, depositing the stinky bucket's contents and covering with newspapers and cardboard, plastic and then replacing the carpet again. Because of the speed of making deposits I don't need to store up kitchen waste in a 20L bucket but can pop out every day with the 5L bucket and empty it. Its much less smelly. The worms can elso get access to the kitchen waste without being hunted by rodents.

A solution for the organic waste

The solution I've used for my piles of organic garden waste, difficult worm bin and composting area that was always too small, was to take a look at the piles that got in my way, and set aside a space slightly larger, or shrink the capacity of things that had too much space. My overflowing composter had a capacity of a cubic meter, and there was always stuff waiting to be processed and added to it as it went down, so I set aside roughly 3 cubic meters for composting. The wormery was way too large for our kitchen waste, and very inconvenient to use, and so I shrunk it down to the the one flip metal bin. In true permaculture style I'll continue to fine tune this as its capacity is tested.

Solutions for growing capacity

In a small garden creating capacity for growing is not so easy. The beans growing up strings on the north side of the house did very well in the past, so I created more trellising on the west side.

Thus I've repeated and multiplied to create a lot of space for growing beans on the house walls, the bean trellis for sitting under being recently completed. The house is covered in a green wall of beans even at this late season.

Some things I still need greater capacity for are growing root and leaf vegetables. Thus I pruned the massively over grown walkway to the brick beds above. The overgrowth of shrubs made the beds inaccessible and unusable as they are hemmed in on the other side by Koi sales tanks for small fry. These highly productive brick beds fed by kitchen grey water produced magnificent leaf harvests in the past that were adequatel for a three person household.

I don't think this is remotely enough area given to calorie rich food plants and I feel I can't achieve enough bed space for vegetables in such a small garden to be 'self sufficient', but I'm aiming for the best I can achieve while still leaving some of the garden wild and shrubby, for the birds. The birds are very important to me. I delight in their song and its so precious to me that I can still hear them. There are times of day when their chorus is heavenly.

This is about it. The things that really bothered me are slowly being ironed out. Please let me know about your strategies for making gardening work flow better. We can learn a lot from each other.

Topic suggestions welcome

You may write to me anytime at the website greenidiom by filling out a comment. You can also use my webmail (website mail) address greenidi@greenidiom.com.

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