As we move from summer into Autumn it’s that time of the year to stop and reflect upon what progress the kitchen garden has made this past growing season before I start and collect the leaf fall from all the sycamore trees surrounding the car park and pack the garden away for another winter.
A good way to appreciate the progression of the garden is to start by looking at what the garden looked like when I moved into the house in 2017. The above two photographs taken in November 2017 show a lovely green lawn on a nice slope. Other than parking my bottom and sitting in the sun a sloping lawn has very limited value for our species. From a wildlife perspective, again it has very little value other than a blackbird hunting a few worms.
Fast forward six years, the garden now provides habitat and cover for blackbirds that nest in the hedge along with an ever-growing collection of birds. This year the garden had its first redpolls visiting the feeders throughout the winter and I’m now having to get creative to stop squirrels from chewing into my feeders. This is a love-hate relationship, it’s great that we now have squirrels living amongst us, but they love my feeders to the point they have become glued to them. I had to stop dropping a few peanuts on the ground to keep the squirrels off the feeders due to them digging holes in my growing beds to hide them.
Spring this year I also sorted out the top corner of the garden that didn’t perform as well as I would have liked and looked a bit messy when nothing was growing in the beds out of season. Messy is a controversial word both in permaculture and wildlife habitat circles. For Wildlife messy areas give the best habitat but when you have a very small space garden the value of a messy area is very limited. As for permaculture, having a messy area is something to be proud of, but I’m not too convinced about this. There are messy areas that add value and messy areas that are just the result of human laziness. Another downside to people practising permaculture is the false belief they need to hoard random items that they may one day find a use for, this is more the case of permaculture messy.
The addition of three new tin-raised beds solved my messy area issue along with woodchip pathways that the blackbirds have patrolled ever since putting them in to make sure no worms or slugs find their way into them. The house sparrows took great interest in the new shoots that grew in the new beds, so all in all the birds have done very well with this new tidiness option. Lessons to be learned when it comes to planting next season.
Enough of my ramblings, below are a few photographs taken this September that will give you an idea of the progress that has been made this past year with the garden design.
You can view the permaculture design process for this design here: https://thepollengardens.com/kitchen-garden-revolutions-design/
