My interest in growing grains has just increased, with the arrival of more seeds, this time from America. The packet contained a corn variety, a variety of millet, and most exciting of all, a perennial rye. Luckily I have all winter to consider how to link this in to my Polyculture Experiment, and where.
Tag Archives: seeds
Polyculture Update. Mid October 2011
Well the original polyculture is progressing nicely, although the initial seeding of chicory was a bit dense, and will need thinning out. In my mid September Update, I tried to explain how the beans were interplanted with the grains, but here are a few pictures, which I hope will clarify my system for you.
The picture is taken looking across a five foot bed, and shows five rows of plants, and groundcover. Row one is rye/bean/rye/bean. Row two is bean/bean/bean/bean/bean. The rows then alternate.
The picture below is a variation, which instead of a row of five beans across the bed, has two clusters of four beans, one each side of the centre of the row.
The benefit of this polyculture layout is that the beans could remain, or be cut back, when the second year’s grain and corn are planted. With the first layout, all of the beans are replaced by the new plants.
A Day at The Sustainable Smallholding
This post has been a little while in the making, and is a result of a telephone conversation with a friend of mine. She had been worried that despite working long hours, she never seemed to get everything done, or even achieve very much. Initially I was going to list all of the things that I didn’t get done this year, but the list was so long that I would never have finished the post. Instead, I’m going to go through some of the stuff that I did around the smallholding today, and then the stuff that didn’t get done.
Polyculture Update. Late September 2010
Again, actual progress with my experimental polyculture has been slow, whilst my thinking has continued to evolve. In the vegetable beds, Broad beans have now been planted. These are a great example of the Permaculture principle ‘every element should perform more than one function’. They are a food crop, provide bee forage, fix nitrogen, yield a lot of biomass, and keep plants in the beds over Winter (green manure). As a food crop, you can eat the young shoots, the whole pods, the seeds young, or dry the seeds for storage. Not bad from a single crop.
Polyculture Update, Mid September
I’ve spent some time planting up another bed to extend the Grain/vegetable polyculture experiment. It’s only about a days work in total, but has been spread over four. Having harvested maincrop potatoes on Saturday, re-shaped the bed, and then added compost on Sunday, today I planted out another batch of Rye.
The planting is late. I wanted to grow another batch of rye, as the first batch started to go to seed, as reported in an Polyculture Progress. I also had to delay planting until the bed was empty. The planting of this bed was also a conscious decision to expand the scope, and scale of the experiment.