Growing undercover (mainly) in Shetland

Inspirational video of Susan's garden at 60 degrees North.



Nectarines grown from a bought fruit, nettles and docken grown and used in the tunnels, polyculture and chaos - I love it!

Thanks! Very inspirational and wonderful to hear about her healing journey!

That is lovely!

I was thinking now about how in some parts of the world such as China, traditional houses tend to surround courtyards. I wonder if this sort of design could surround a small food forest and protect it from wind?

My guess is that parts of Scotland could have tall, impressive forests that give shelter, given the mild, wet climate, if a forest could get established. I heard that they did have extensive pine forests but these were destroyed by human activities. I always like to see Scots pine trees that were planted and went wild; they are a cheerful, beautiful tree, and rare enough here too!

M Ljin: Wind is indeed a great problem in much of the highlands so shelter is key for providing a growing environment. Did you hear that the structure she grows in is called a 'polycrub'? They were developed in Shetland to stand up to the extreme wind conditions possible in the exposed islands as a community project and named polycrub after the local growing areas that had been built of stone walls and called 'planticrubs' (source). The stone walls also keep the free ranging sheep out of the food growing area...

Even on Skye we have some sheltered areas that have pretty impressive trees, and the 'great glen' that runs through the highlands SW-NE to Inverness again has some beautiful wooded areas. Shelter builds shelter, so once some trees are established natural regeneration spreads slowly (give or take overgrazing from deer/sheep pressure).
You can gain a couple degrees easily by adding shelter, but not much more than that, so to get good summer temperatures for warm climate crops like tomatoes, even courgettes (Zucchini) we need some sort of greenhouse effect. Because of the wind, plastic is unfortunately much safer to achieve this than glass....