Garden picture exchange!

Leila Rich wrote:I think three sisters is a really difficult system, as climate and knowledge are probably missing all sorts of things that made it such a success.

I should have said "in out of context climates"
Looking back at my post, it's rather negative about three sisters.
Sorry about that!
Geraldine must be quite a tough climate; I'd love to hear updates about how it goes this year with the hugels.

^^^i've rocked a pretty awesome three sisters, but the third sister was SUNFLOWER, not corn.

anywho been taking pictures:

the hugel spiral goes slow, still havent gotten it completely together, but its getting there. the trenches have been dug and shaped, its been sheetmulched, and i have covered up the whole area with the first few layers of wood chips, straw, leaves and bio char. already planted along the edges, roses, anise hyssops, some hibiscus and a lot of perrenial onions and strawberries.






got that to a good stopping point and cleared and prepared this other area, along the edges of the fence.
soon there will be roses and grapes and more hibiscus growing here:





the last hurrah of the tomato flood:



love that volunteer zinnia out of nowhere popping up above the maters and tomatillo

my friend the black cherry tree =)

leila hamaya wrote:^^^i've rocked a pretty awesome three sisters, but the third sister was SUNFLOWER, not corn

leila, what variety(s) of squash/beans did you use?
I had four sisters-the usual, plus sunflowers.
Actually, it was more like several sisters-cosmos, basil, nasturtiums...
I've tried to grow cleome which is supposed to be the official 'fourth sister' but I've never even got it to germinate

are some of those green fruit tomatoes, or is that the most enormous tomatillo crop!?
Zinnia's another thing I've had no luck with.

i dont think i will be able to remember. likely some kind of spaghetti squash and maybe some zucchini or other summer squash, like a yellow....or delicata, just cause those are the ones i grow often. and it was whatever kind of bean i had at the time =)

yeah that tomatillo is pretty epic, and i still havent gotten a single ripe one. but the others all around it are tomatoes, some gold, green, pink and red tomatoes that arent totally ripe. when the rains came the whole tomato patch got its second wind and started pumping out a lot of new growth. theres two raised beds behind that bed that you cant see in that pic filled with bazillions of tomatoes =)

and then along the back is the raspberry epicness too =)

the zinnia was a surprise! no idea how it came to be there, we dont even grow zinnias! and its like five feet tall at least to poke its head above the maters

Basically all of NZ is having an extremely dry summer and there's been some big fires already;
We're not even into the 'usual' drought/fire season yet...
No rain here for a month, which is unheard of in Wellington!
I'm watering the 'important' things-even the established fruit trees are suffering-

Here's my newest food forest area in August, and today:


The marina di chiogga pumpkin has clambered up the wall behind the compost heap,
and doesn't seem fussed by the dry at all.


Nor does the mountain pawpaw. It's four, and I'm hoping this is the year it sets fruit.

The weather is still cold here but the birds starting to sing
and the daffodils are popping up!

spring comes early in California =) so i have been doing a lot with the gardens and plants.
my winter stuff got eaten soooo badly by critters, and by the time i figured it out it was too late to seed it again, so theres been a long time without much food coming out of the gardens.
now re seeding everything, but this cilantro, lettuce and carrots made it uneaten, so i have just started harvested stuff again =)
well most of it is still small, but at least theres something happening in feb, while the rest of garden wakes up...
and the rosemary is lovely while its in flower.


found this in the hoop house beds, think it must be from a critter, they found the fluffy soil of the beds and decided to stash some acorns there...potted it up now, so have a baby oak tree now=)
think its a black oak, by the size and color

even though its a bit of gizmo, and maybe not everyones cup of tea here.... i am really loving the seed starting area i have now....


ready for spring! and planted soooo much this last couple of weeks. =) still got tons more to plant, but i am feeling on top of it for being rather ahead of schedule....

this one is in a suburban back garden in Southampton, England
(first year trying to establish a vegetable garden - it was all a miserable lawn previously)

This is my backyard. I put in one mound last year and then 2 more a month or so ago.

J Gannon wrote:This is my backyard. I put in one mound last year and then 2 more a month or so ago.

I envy your helper's hat, and ability to socially wear diapers. How did the three sisters work out? I find that pumpkin planted in direct sun by itself does much much better than when it was sitting under the corn.

My climate is not the best for corn so just the fact that I got some made it a success in my book. The pumpkins went crazy and had to be cut back a few times, and I got more zuccs than I handle. The little one had plenty of zucc bread that year. The beans did well on the eastern side but for some reason only on that sid . I did the tepees last year and they worked better. I also did squash stand alone last year. I think when they had all that stuff to climb on they were more vigorous, but I got plenty both years. She loves pumpkin bread too.

Here is a video update of a Hugelkultur garden I created for a client this past spring. Javan K. Bernakevitch and I will be teaming up to teach a workshop all about Hugelkultur and Holzer style gardening during the Ecological Living Summit this summer.

Loose, Rich, Fertile Soil.
Three years ago this was sand. It was good for growing grass and the occasional weed.
This is what happens to soil when it is not trampled on, driven on, tilled, compacted, left exposed, or treated with poisons. All I've done is add compost, leaf mold, grass clippings, and leaves to the surface and kept it covered with mulch.
My fingers are straight. I can drive my hand in almost to my wrist. Plant roots have unimpeded ability to grow. Synthetic fertilizers are not needed when plant roots can spread out. Tilling is not needed to loosen the soil. This is what organic gardening is all about.

Ken, your leaf mold thread needs to be bumped forward again. This photo would be the ideal addition.
.............

I stumbled upon this stump today. It's in a spot that I regularly walk past. Look at all of the moss and lichens.  Only nature can make this sort of garden. It's like a little world unto itself.

This is southern VA, NOT Montana~ thank goodness that snow is the poor man's fertilizer!!

Amazing photos! So inspiring! My goal this year is to work on improving my native cost soil (backwards I know, but I'm learning more and more every year and initially skipped over this just not realizing how poor my soil really was). Here's a view of my suburbia lot from my upstairs window.

Hello everybody!

This is my first post in the permies forum, I am so excited!!!

I live in Holland, 30km east of Amsterdam, and my husband and I have bought a typical Dutch row house here. So we've got a garden that's like 40m³ (about 48 square yards?) small! So when we got excited about permaculture three years ago, we started to implement the design concepts into our tiny garden and - I think - ended up with a very good solution. Here is the draft I made for myself (planning) and you guys.

Please also see my Facebook photoalbum on this topic since you'll be able to see the development of the garden from construction till now and some more info on what we got there.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=679749485421965&set=a.535303903199858.1073741826.100001607604474&type=3&theater

I think you can pretty much call it Nano Permaculture what we're trying to do here =) This year's gonna be our 3. year of gardening and hopefully it will all develop better this tme. I ordered many more flowers and climbers (3 clematis!) for the front garden and try to set up a nice veggy planting plan for the raised beds in the back garden. Hope I can share some pictures with you in summer. Finally summer pictures!

Thanks guys, and please let me know if you see anything that has been misdesigned, won't work as intended or if you have any suggestions to improve anything. I'd be glad to hear from you.

Kerstin

It's autumn here and we've just had our first cold Southerly storm.
The garden's in that awkward in-between phase where the winter brassicas are in,
but the white butterflies are still around...
The plant in the perspex cloche is a rocoto chili, which are perennial in my climate.

Today I did autumn jobs:
-wheelbarrowed a few loads of seaweed home
-Harvested the Cox's orange apples and stored
-planted some large garlic cloves to see what putting it in really early does,
put very small bulbs aside to lacto-ferment
checked medium bulbs are 'sound' and stored
-plant shallots and elephant garlic
-ferment some tomato seeds for saving
-clean dried perpetual spinach seed
-cut broccoli, and leave to dry for seed
-took a million cuttings from the English lavendar
-cut the heads off the sunflowers to dry
-ate lots of raspberries and cherry tomatoes

Hi there - I had forgotten about this thread/forum but things are springing into life again on my wacky little allotment in Staffordshire UK, so I thought I would post a pic from last summer and maybe an up to date one later today. There are various features to my allotment which I believe entitle me to call it a permaculture plot!

OK here it is today!

The perimeter beds have the perennials in. Lots of berries, currants, asparagus, rhubarb, artichoke, mushroom logs, herbs, comfrey, lavender. The paths are chipped Christmas trees and other woodchip, no membrane (hate it). Radiating paths for ease of moving back to the centre where the compost bins are. The inner beds have a four course rotation but the only digging is for the potatoes, and I try to mingle plants within each bed. The hedgebank is the wildlife zone, it was a rubbish heap when I arrived but the hedge is now laid and wildflowers planted, a log pile habitat and nest boxes put up. It is very different to most other plots on the site!

My son would like to have it pointed out to the world in general that he is not doing what it looks like he's doing!

Here's a series of photos following the construction of my hugelbeets last year! I wish I thought to take more photos during the harvest, the potato plants were quite simply larger and taller than any I've ever seen online, so tall that the stems literally began decapitating themselves on their trellis twine! And by the end the tomato plants were practically trees. Even with only full sun from around 10am to 4pm, I got a beautiful harvest of pumpkins, beans, cucumbers, raspberries, and tomatoes, with the only failures being onions, which I planted way too late in the season to get decent bulbs, and carrots, which I never figured out how to thin out properly.

That first hugelbeet just about killed me -- all dug by hand, all of the wood lugged around, all the soil piled back up again by hand. My brothers were thankfully there to take turns chipping in.

After that first hand-dug hugelbeet, I was so wiped out that I realized it would take at least two days per mound at this point, and I was going to miss the growing season. So for the others, we decided to simply plop down the weed barriers, drop the wood on them, and cover them with organic matter and then a layer of rotted manure from down the road. That we brought in by pickup truck, and then tipped onto the mounds by upending the wheelbarrow in a half-million trips. I was worried that we might have problems with the logs rolling downhill, or issues with erosion during a rainstorm, but they've held up magnificently. In fact, the bottom three hugelbeets are far richer than the original top hugelbeet, thanks to that manure!

Here's those same mounds, about two weeks later!

This last photo was taken almost exactly six weeks after I first stuck my shovel in the ground. Hugelkultur works spectacularly!

Something that also works spectacularly: that fencing around the garden! It's tight around the ground to keep the chipmunks and voles out, but it's way too wobbly for any of our plentiful squirrels, raccoons, or other raiders to climb. We never had a single interloper all year.

Spring is making it's way! Blueberry blooms.

after preparing quite a few beds the long slow way for the last year, it is finally all coming together at once ....
...been hard at work planting trees, making a new fedge, and finishing up the newest beds...and just finished this one and actually finally started the fun part - planting in them !

havent thought to take pictures of the newer beds, but still got a mountain of work to pull it all together...maybe i will come back with some good pictures soon ....but after finally getting to plant this new bed up, i thought to take some pics...

these guys are all really tiny atm, but theres a couple of roses, a couple of hibiscus, and a few grapes...just newly planted =)
now that the bigger perennial stuff is in i can start planting them up with the smaller stuff, ground cover and herbs and such....

I originally planted these daffodils to suppress grass around some saplings (ha! as you can see, the grass won long ago), but I have been pleased with how many critters use the blossoms' trumpets as temporary housing. You can see a little spider chilling out in the pale blossom. These pics are from a couple weeks ago; since then, I've added a few blueberry bushes to my garden, but they're not very aesthetically pleasing at this point.

Patrick Winters wrote: In Pics: Iron wood!

my first and only experience with iron wood was so.west virginia near fairy stone state park

wow! what a treat to meet such a strong but small diameter wood! Hope to read about your experiences with it in hugels! and, wish I had access to it now, it's a magical wood

Here's my first show and tell AND it's of my first major earthworks project and hugelkultur swale!

This hillside was covered in blackberry bushes that were so tall that they were suffocating several medium sized trees. Those trees were opportunists anyway and needed to be cut down. I cleared the hillside and started at the bottom with a good berm and worked my way up. The ground is filled with large boulders (left over from an ice age glacier that rolled through the area some thousands of years ago). The ones I could manage by hand, I moved them in an aesthetically pleasing ways as I went along. This project should continue to evolve over the next few years.

Out behind the chicken house.

Great photos Jennifer but isn't nature weird when you think about it ?

Chunky green globe artichoke


Oca, ciboulette


Rasberries (Heritage) peruvian physalis, Crosnes...


Aronia in very thick clay


Nine star broccoli (Three year old plant, top head)


Wisteria scents the terrace

Beautiful.

Her are a couple of pics that are this spring when I post in summer and if things go as planned its going to be a jungle in there.......I hope

This shady, wet area had yet again become a forest of horsetail, dandelion, and creeping buttercup. A great breeding ground for the bindweed! I've been wanting to turn it into more of a native plant area. This area has my natural soil, which is heavy clay. It hasn't rained in a week and it was still damp. Good thing, because when it's dry, digging is almost impossible. I was able to put the dirt back on top by picking up a chunk of it in each hand -- that's how clay it is. So the hugel I built is in hope of getting plants up out of the damp enough that they can compete with the horsetail.

Irene Kightley wrote:
Sloe gin time !
Chicken feast, one Amaranth plant at a time

what kind of tree before chiken?