Jeremy Stocks

Have you ever visited the ancient agricultural terraces in Tumair north of Riyadh? They are the site of the famous iris fields.

http://www.toursaudiarabia.com/ and

http://inxps.blogspot.de/2009/04/after-browsing-interesting-places-to.html

i visited there in 1997.

Hi there,

As the first rays of sunlight fall upon my Bavarian soil I begin to think of spring. Long way to go yet as the last frost isn't till May 15 but I'm quite happy to help out a little here. I am British but I speak German (it was described as perfect the other day at the farm shop where I buy my meat), so IÄd be happy to see if I can translate any odd pertinent articles which come our way which might be of interest to the English
speaking world.

I've just created a slightly improved version of his raised horseshoe bed which my be useful. I've blogged about it. Check on my profile.

Hi there,

I was so impressed with the ideas in Toby's book I thought I'd start a Facebook group to see how many are interested in its contents.

It's over at:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=113047912060862

Well I probably live the closest to Sepp Holzer's place here and I'm surrounded by Bavarian/Austrian farmers. Here are my thoughts.

I think Pc should be climate and soil specific. The foods you can grow on your land are determined by the number of frost free days as defined in my Horticulture textbook as days when the mean temperature is 6 degrees C. Realistically the higher you go or the further north you go you are going to get less and less days.

The soil you are lumbered with is a product of the geology of where you are. It pays to follow what Toby Hemenway says and research the local geology and soils of your region. Might I be bold and say that Pc should really be discussed within different USDA temperature groups?

My God lad, giz a chance! We're not done yet!

Paul there aren't many rocks around of a large enough size.

I've almost filled up my raised bed. It's a sort of three permaculture ideas in one system. It's a wooden sided version of a horsehoe bed which I've heard so much about via Toby Hemenway's "Gaia's Garden" (got to stop reading that awesome book!). It is layered in lasagne style with cardboard at the bottom, the horse manure in the middle and finally topsoil at the top, with an inch finally of compost planned from the local composting centre.

Here's a link to the story.

http://iamrogertheshrubber.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/gonna-start-a-revolution-from-my-veg-bed/

Right then, I've this week received "Earth Care" by Whitefield and Hemenway's "Gaia's Garden".

I've had trouble sleeping since owning these books It was bad enough reading the online version of Tobys book! I just had to buy it to give him the credit! Now I have it in my hands it's even worse! The concepts in it I call "mind bombs"!

It was watching a video featuring Geoff Lawton also about a food forest which emphasised the notion of time in Pc. One thing I do not have. Call it an influence of now now from Thatcher's Britain, but as I understand it if you mess something up this year, nature is very forgiving. So that takes the pressure of every year to produce large quantities of food, and focus onto reliability of food not quantity. figuring that out leads to me to a calmer mind, and a longer term view.

Is this right?

Was woken up the other day by this unbelievably loud machine. Went outside to see what was going on, and was thrilled to see it was the local council (Gemeinde) shredding scheme - called a "Häckselaktion" here in Germany.

I've been pruning a few weeks now - a posh term for hacking bits off me bushes - and I'd accumulated a huge pile of branches which took up vast amounts of space. Rather than take them to the composty place I decided to put my name down for this scheme. You get fifteen minutes for free and they do around 4 cubic metres, which is around what I had.

So along comes this enormous truck with a huge attachment on the back, and shreds it all up into a cubic metre of lovely mulch. All done in a jiffy.

The shredded stuff will be the basis of a new veg bed I'm planning, on top of which will go rotted horse plop then soil, to build a variant of "Hugelkultur". On that will be an attempt at a polyculture bed.

Do such schemes exist elsewhere? They're brilliant!