Vegies down under during Spring - raised garden beds using recycled water tanks

Hey everyone!

Yeah, it's Spring here Down Under and I put together a video to make all you lot in colder Autumn climates jealous! hehe! On a serious note, my farm is pretty far south Down Under and at elevation so it gets cold here over Winter - not quite freezing though - but still pretty cold with the occasional bit of snow.

The video has some of the raised garden beds. I use old leaky water tanks which I scrounge about the area and cut up into rings and fill with compost. They survive everything - so far - that nature chucks at them.

Hope you enjoy it!

http://permaculturenews.org/2012/11/06/food-forests-part-6-diversity-or-picking-a-garden-salad/

Chris

Excellent video, Thanks for sharing it. I wholeheartedly agree that learning to identify all the various plants in your local region is a most important skill. Great looking garden you've got going there. Curious, are the rings just filled with compost or did you load wood underneath them before putting the dirt on?

Thanks, you are very observant. The raised beds are 70% compost (the top layer) and the remaining 30% is small chunks of hardwood, sticks, weeds, garden refuse (fern fronds) etc. The beds are very well drained and I set them up initially because of excessive rainfall (the wettest couple of years since records began here in 1870) but still use them now and most likely will into the far future. I found after a couple of seasons that the compost was quite compacted for some reason - especially the heavy feeders like tomatoes - which surprised me. What's your view on this? I practice rotation to for specific crops like tomatoes. I also stopped growing potatoes in the beds as they became weeds and were really hard to clear out. The potatoes are in another area and system now (raised beds, but in large plant pots with no bottoms where the soil is thrown into the cottage garden at the end of the growing season - the potatoes are happily growing wild amongst the flowers now too).

It is really amazing how much of the vegetable plants are edible. Cheers. Chris