9378_TheMinimalistGardener

Contents

About the Author

Introduction

vi vii

1

Permaculture Gardening

1

2

How to Garden Successfully in the Sun or Shade

15

3

The Minimalist Garden

19

4

Raised Bed Gardening

27

5

Building a Drystone Path

37

6

Examples of Permaculture Designed Gardens

47

7 Seeds

59

8 Plants

63

9 Slugs

73

10

Plants for the Minimalist Garden

79

11

Patrick’s Favourite Perennial Vegetables

89

12 Polycultures

95

13

Winter Salads

101

14

Fruit Trees and Shrubs

103

15

Planting Fruit Trees

113

16 Pruning

121

17

125

Permaculture Principles Beyond the Garden

Resources

131

133

Photograph Acknowledgements

Index

135

Michael Guerra’s garden, showing productive use of small space. garden polycultures or not depends on your priorities. They’re most worthwhile if you have a small garden and want to get the maximum yield out of it. If your priority is simplicity and ease of management, single crops are probably best.

Stacking In almost every part of the Earth where growing conditions are good enough, the natural vegetation is a multi-layered forest of trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants.

Natural grassland is only found where rainfall is lacking, and it generally produces much less biomass per year than forest.

Yet most of our food-producing systems, whether on farms or in gardens, resemble grassland, inasmuch as they are a single layer of herbaceous plants. Multi-layer systems, such as the forest garden mentioned above, invariably yield more food.

Although each layer may yield less than it would if grown alone, the overall yield is higher.

In permaculture we call multi-layer growing ’stacking’. Growing vegetables of different heights, as in some of the examples of polyculture given above, is stacking on a small-scale. In general stacking is a matter of thinking in three dimensions, of seeing a garden as a volume of space rather than just a surface area. So using any vertical Permaculture Gardening | 5

Clematis montana

Mini pond

Trellis, 2m

Veitchberry

Flowers Buddleia

Annual vegetables Herbaceous border

WL HOUSE

Willows

Raspberries Herbs Wattle hurdles, 2m

Green­ house

Flowers

Red currants

Shed

N 5m I Design map.

Hardy kiwis

Willow ’fedge’

Rainwater tank

Compost

Wild garlic

direct route from the back door to the back garden. We felt that all the items on our wish list were realistic in the circumstances.

We decided against any structural changes to the front garden, but considered three possible concepts for the back. I made enlarged photocopies of the back garden from the base map and sketched on them in pencil. One concept had the lawn where it was but changed to a semi-circular shape, one had a circular lawn in the middle, and the other had the lawn at the far end. As you can see from the design map, we chose the first of these. Not only did we like it best, but it required the least work to implement.

The design map shows how we designed for privacy and beauty while leaving plenty of space for food crops. The extreme western section of the garden became a combined wildlife area and windbreak. This included the trees and shrubs which were there plus self-seeded ash trees and planted willows and buddleia. Annual pollarding and coppicing kept it at the right height to provide shelter for the front garden vegetables without blocking the view. We have made a few minor changes since then, notably moving the greenhouse further to the east. But overall the design has worked really well.

Service to the Planet You may well ask how this kind of permaculture design contributes to sustainability.

It does enable you to plan ecological features into your garden right from the start, but that is not its main contribution.

The biggest single component of our ecological footprint is the ecological cost of our food. Most of this cost is not in the growing of it but in its transport, distribution and processing. Growing our own fresh food at home eliminates most of the costs.

Permaculture design can make home gardening easier, more pleasant and more productive. If this leads to us growing some of our food at home, or growing more of it than we would in a poorly designed garden, it’s of great service to the planet.

Personal transport makes up another big chunk of our ecological footprint. If good design makes our gardens sufficiently pleasant places to spend time in so we make fewer car trips, so much the better for the Earth.

Permaculture Gardening | 13

A sunny orchard for apples and pears that creates part shade for understorey plants like comfrey.

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Patrick’s minimalist garden. the perennials and self-seeders, and you want to be sure of a return on all the work you put into them. Heavy clays are only really suitable for a minimalist garden if they are well structured and well drained, because of course there will be no digging.

As for light, perennials and self-seeders need as much as annuals, but not necessarily at the same time of year. Many self-seeders do most of their growing in autumn and spring. Perennials, which spend the winter as a mature rootstock or complete plant, can put on a lot of growth early in the spring, when annuals are still seeds in the seed packet or at most seedlings in a seed tray. This means the plants in a minimalist garden are doing much of their growing before trees come into leaf. Most of them can be grown successfully in the shade of deciduous fruit trees, as long as they get some indirect light from the side. In fact a minimalist vegetable garden is very much the same thing as the ground layer of an edible woodland garden.

Many self-seeding vegetables, including some perennial ones, can be invasive if given the opportunity. They do not get this in a minimalist garden, where most of the space is occupied by vigorous perennial plants. But in an annual vegetable garden there is plenty of bare soil for much of the year, and they can spread into it like weeds.

So minimalist and annual gardens should not ideally be sited side by side.

A minimalist garden needs regular attention, if only to note which of the wide variety of plants is ready to eat, so it should not be sited in some out-of-the-way corner.

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Raised beds built with coppiced chestnut to bring the beds within comfortable reach for someone with arthritis.

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