Garden picture exchange!

Great photos everybody - really motivating - thanks !

Progress of the hugelkultur beds at the bottom of the garden between large fruit trees with all sorts of things in between.



The wood is for fun for us and the dogs and the poultry use it too - as well as being a productive food forest.





Google has just updated the maps in our area, this is the hectare around the house (Which is taking ages to finish.) with goat, pig and chicken sheds, seven ponds, multiple veg plots and a little forest garden taking shape at the bottom.

I love all the picture such great inspiration.

This is my suburban garden. The first picture is a view from the street, this is from last spring, I'll try to get more up over the summer. also some crocus I planted in the front yard to make a fairy circle. My friends keep arguing that a fairy circle has to be mushroom...

Really enjoying the variety of gardens in these photos. Here are a few recent shots from our Seattle garden:

Not much going on in the vegetable garden yet.

Flower beds are starting to get pretty.

Hester Winterbourne wrote:

Ryan Molpus wrote:Here is the start of my project. I just built the front beds and starting a large swale on the back side that will allow multiple areas of draining water to be captured. It's a little boring at the moment, but will take pics as things progress.

I live in an HOA, so planning to push the envelope a bit so I can start some form of change. I have a ton of starts (edibles and companions) that will be added over the next few weeks.

Ryan - tell me more! What is an HOA? It looks so exciting to me because I haven't heard of most of the things, but it sounds like it will be beautiful and definitely push some envelopes once people realise you are eating your front garden!

Oh wow I want a Honeyberry!

HOA = Home Owners Association

Basically a bunch of neighborhood busy bodies that get their jollies from telling others what they can and can't do with their property. Never ever ever buy a home with an HOA. Nothing but trouble.

Been taking a few pictures of the action, this is one right at the base of an oak tree.

EDIT: Pictures arent working for me, Ill fix this later...

More to come on this garden, but I just cant wait Im so exited about it...

This is a 1500 square foot community allotment garden plot in Victoria, BC, Canada. I have the north half for my food forest and my grandma is growing veggies on the south half.


this is the whole plot from the north


This is the north corner, those are hugelbeds with about 1ft deep of wood put in a 1-2ft hole and covered back up


This is what my hugel beds look like halfway through.

New Hugle
garlic on the way, Ya Ta!!

Iris.

Thanks for sharing, some beautiful looking gardens here.

Google earth from late July of last year - sunflowers got big enough they are visible from space! Check for the little yellow pixels in the center snake garden.

The making of the first raised huge, I have been digging holes in the terraces and filling them with rotten logs and leafs. I think the future looks like raised hugles, I'll keep sharing here.

Alex Ames wrote:Not much going on in the vegetable garden yet.

A couple of weeks later.

^nice garden!
most of my stuff is still just mulch or baby sprouts... but ill get there lol

about a quarter (Garden area) of my former food forest yard:

Getting rain early, the garlic is looking good, the hugle is planted and the our last freeze was a week ago. Rainbow Country!!

First is my Hugal bed with a romeo dwarf cherry tree and various herbs getting chocking out the invasive grass

second is my Quince tree in bloom

These 4'x4' beds have a 6" layer of rotten forest wood for absorption of the water that all flows to this corner of the property. So far so good, it will suck up surface water and store it for later. So far, plenty of rain this year, it is usually windy and dry until July. We also have a hoop house for tomatoes, eventually we will get away from using sheet plastic, for now it is helping us to achieve some form of food sovereignty. This is year three on this land and year two of intensive gardening here. We have learned so much.

I am just getting started. We built these swales, hugleculture beds and a small pond in mid May. We rented an 11,000 lb excavator and a big garden building party.

Here is our 224' long swale. It has 2 sweet cherries, 2 plumes, 2 peaches, and Asian pear, and an apricot tree planted in it. The cover crops are just starting to sprout in this photo.



Here is the rest of the front yard garden. I am still cleaning up the beds and planting them.

2 hugels

Yay, gardens!

This was grass with 4 really spindly trees last year.




And this didn't go anywhere near how I planned, but since I'm learning at a breakneck pace and stuff is growing like gangbusters I don't care. It was also mostly grass last year.

Now, this is very pathetic compared to all of your awesome permaculture projects but I am just getting started so here is my little container garden! I have to start somewhere! We just moved in so the lawn will soon be converted into raised beds. But I still wanted to share.

Thomas West wrote:Google earth from late July of last year...

Did you have Harry Potter on a visit?

What are you using for your cover crops?

Kate Muller wrote:I am just getting started. We built these swales, hugleculture beds and a small pond in mid May. We rented an 11,000 lb excavator and a big garden building party.

Here is our 224' long swale. It has 2 sweet cherries, 2 plumes, 2 peaches, and Asian pear, and an apricot tree planted in it. The cover crops are just starting to sprout in this photo.



Here is the rest of the front yard garden. I am still cleaning up the beds and planting them.

Annie Howell-Adams wrote:My 20 x 20 community garden plot with 85 feet of hugel bed. This is a new way to garden for me, The mounds are layered with old wood, kelp, compost, soil, and recently composted llama manure. It's just January here in Washington. Everything is "cooking" for spring planting.

Any new pics??

here chickie, chickie, chickie~

The garden was doing great until a dern woodchuck got past the electric fence!

Cassie Langstraat wrote:Now, this is very pathetic compared to all of your awesome permaculture projects but I am just getting started so here is my little container garden! I have to start somewhere! We just moved in so the lawn will soon be converted into raised beds. But I still wanted to share.

Nothing to be ashamed of here, Cassie. Like you said, you've got to start somewhere, and a container garden is infinitely better than no garden. Good luck on the lawn conversion, be sure to keep us posted on how it's going

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step"
- Ghandi

Mitch Purvis wrote:

Cassie Langstraat wrote:Now, this is very pathetic compared to all of your awesome permaculture projects but I am just getting started so here is my little container garden! I have to start somewhere! We just moved in so the lawn will soon be converted into raised beds. But I still wanted to share.

Nothing to be ashamed of here, Cassie. Like you said, you've got to start somewhere, and a container garden is infinitely better than no garden. Good luck on the lawn conversion, be sure to keep us posted on how it's going

Charles Tarnard wrote:And this didn't go anywhere near how I planned, but since I'm learning at a breakneck pace and stuff is growing like gangbusters I don't care.

Favorite quote of the day; also, story of my life.

Thanks! Yay gardens!

My first harvest of 2014 (raspberries):




Here is the same photo as above, with annotation to show what all is going on here. You can see it full size here: https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5567/14270035129_836a84758d_o.jpg


Basically this is a raspberry/marionberry/grape/cornelian cherry guild, located under our old zipline -- the kids are in college now, they don't use it so I am starting to use it as a trellis support. I think there may be a lot of good reasons to have a cable running through your food forest. It can hold up any plant, I have about about a dozen vines climbing up it thus far. It is held in place by posts at each end, which are held in place with deadman anchors. So the whole thing can be removed.

I did not plant the trefoil, but I allow it to grow since it is a nitrogen fixer.

Eventually all the grass will be shaded out or under mulch. But for now I just cut it a few times a year with a scythe.

I let the teasel grow so I can harvest it for tubes for mason bees. However I don't let it go to seed.

The Cornelian Cherry is a bit buried at the moment but it will eventually overtop the raspberries. Ditto for some of the grapes, and the oak. I grew both the oak and the chestnut from seed - just stuck the nuts in the ground.

looking good Dave... Just FYI the teasel is a healing herb also and has been used with good success in cases of Lyme disease, fibromyalgia etc... it is also a pain reliever... here is an article on it... http://homegrownherbalist-net.myshopify.com/blogs/news/11055237-talking-to-teasel-dipsacus-spp

Blayne Sukut wrote:looking good Dave... Just FYI the teasel is a healing herb also and has been used with good success in cases of Lyme disease, fibromyalgia etc... it is also a pain reliever... here is an article on it... http://homegrownherbalist-net.myshopify.com/blogs/news/11055237-talking-to-teasel-dipsacus-spp

Thanks Blayne. I had heard that the root can be used for medicinal purposes but I did not know the details.

I have actually come to like teasel, for the following reasons:
- It has a deep tap root which helps break up my clay soils
- It seems to kill a lot of insects and some slugs - the leaf branches hold water and I find a lot of dead insects and even some drowned slugs in there. I think I read somewhere that teasel is a bit carnivorous? On the down side I have found all kinds of insects drowned there, including mason bees.
- It provides tubes for mason bees
- Native bees and butterflies love the flower
- It provides a fair amount of woody biomass

Like I said I draw the line in letting it go to seed (I cut it right after it flowers). My soil already has enough teasel seed in it to last a lifetime.

Just to make sure I wasn't imagining things, I checked my teasel for dead bugs:






And some live ones, checking out the space:



I'm pretty sure the bug on the left is a Monodontomerus wasp which is a major parasite of mason bees.

mark masters wrote:Getting rain early, the garlic is looking good, the hugle is planted and the our last freeze was a week ago. Rainbow Country!!

The garlic bed is fantastic. How do you manage to get such even growth of what looks like a large leaf area per plant? I can not get my head around the very lush growth with the last freeze only one week ago! You should have a bumper yield. I was amazed to learn that the yield of garlic could be as high as 40 t/ha with plant densities of 600,000/ha ( http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/39/6/1272.full.pdf ). May I suggest you weigh the garlic (after drying) and calculate the yield per square metre. Even better, also count the number of leaves, roughly estimate the length of the longer green leaves and measure the average stalk diameter of a sample of plants. Post the results on Permies for all of to try to emulate.