Kt’s Permaculture Garden - April 2021

I haven’t  blogged  about my urban permaculture garden design since last November , (you can read more about  why,  in my blog post “Website Design Update - Catching Up” from a few days ago). So much has changed in my edible garden over the winter months as I implemented the permanent structural part of the garden design. 

I spent time moving the compost and beautiful soil created in my pop-up temporary edible garden last year, so that it could be used near the surface of the new raised beds.

The raised bed along the south facing stone wall was the first one to be constructed. These amazing raised bed kits from British Recycled Plastic in Hebden Bridge (about 45 mins drive away from my house), come in a variety of different sizes and depths. The material is made from British plastic waste and will basically last forever. I chose the 60cm depth option as its great for seated gardening.

The raised beds were filled with a mix of partially composted homemade compost, (which is quite wood shavings dense), soil/builders rubble removed from another area of the garden and then topped with the great quality compost/soil mix created in last years pop-up garden.

All 4 beds structure complete. I had some welcome help from a local friend, though I reckon that someone with good physical health and strength would be able to put these kits together independently.

One of my favourite parts of this design was lining the bottom of the raised beds with several years of my Morning Pages journals. Its such a good feeling to literally be growing a garden from my thoughts and reflections on life!

Soil/builders rubble from an area of my garden where an outdoors cat enclosure was constructed last year. there was just enough to fill the raised beds in combination with the composted materials also used.

The filled beds mulched with local wood chip, with pea gravel from local builders merchant, paths surrounding.

Seedlings benefiting from the warm microclimate created from the solar heat storage in the black plastic plus semi composted soil/compost mix.

Baby pea plants in the April sun. The soil/compost mix in the beds has thrived under the protection of the wood chip mulch over the last 3 months.

Over the the winter and spring I have also been implementing the next part of the design for the  wildlife habitat area of my garden. I planted 70 diverse trees as part of a mixed hedgerow as in my November 2020 garden blog and planted out a mixed range of perennial herbaceous ground cover plants suitable for a North facing slope, supplied by the wonderful Those Plant People permaculture plant nursery just 5 miles up the Aire valley from my house. 

Planting out hardy perennial herbaceous ground cover.

Earlier this month I added a mix of annual and perennial wild flowers and grasses mix to the exposed patches of soil (created by leaving fallen sycamore leaves as a mulch over the winter). This is the second year of doing this, I will also repeat the process in the autumn. Creating a diverse “meadow”/woodland edge in newly laid lawn is a gradual process over a number of years, but should eventually result in a space where many insects and birds can thrive.

I used some of the same load of local wood chip used to mulch the raised beds, to top up the mulch surrounding the baby trees and herbaceous ground cover. The main functions being to improve soil fertility and water holding abilities pus creating an instant additional insect habitat.

Creating some order earlier this spring in my ridiculously large seed collection!

So many wonderful dandelions self seeded from the few already in my garden last year. The Edge is where the magic happens!

I’m returning to my monthly garden update blogs now, so feel free to sign up to my
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