Emilia Hazelip Technique

Yes,

Actually horsetail have a male and a female plant. They don't look alike at first. But they also have a huge roots system. Good herb for medicinal purposes.

Isabelle

Emilia is my favourite along with Fukuoka, Jeavons, Charles etc... here is what i learned from them. :)

WOW!!! Aljaz, what a nice garden. But tel me, on picture number 3, look like you have a covert plant on the bed. What is it exactly?

Isabelle

Flowering white? It's buckwheat... it was a cover plant last year also for flowers (tea)... it self seeds with no problems so we have it again with undercover of potatoes, along with some broad beans and i already planted in some cabbages which will soon have room as buckwheat, early potatoes and broad beans are harvested.

close-up of the buckwheat area

June the 6th. Tomatoes have set fruit.

Aljaz that is a great looking garden!

Thanks Aljaz...

After your post, I did a research on Jeavons that I didn't know. I found a series of video about him and is techniques


Absolutly genious...BUT

There is difference with Emilia's technique. She is letting the garden residues in the garden to compost there and the roots in place to rooten in the grond. But he is taking everything out of the garden to do compost in a compost pile. Looking at your garden, I guess it is what you are doing? SO from Hazelip, you took only the raise beds?

isabelle

plus the double dig, thats kind stuck in my mind as one of the keys to biointensive, which i am not fond of. well i like some of the stuff they talk about, just not fond of the double digging.

did emilia double dig? i dont remember reading about that. just the trench digging, and throwing that on top of the bed, which is a neat idea.

long ago i double dug a bed, just to try it out , ONCE ! that was enough double digging for me! whew!

Leila,

No Emilia doesn't double dig...like you said, she works the tranches and put the goround on top of the bed. In the video, the double digging looks pretty easy. Put if, like me, you start on a ground cover with grass, just taking off the grass is a huge job. And my ground is more clay than theirs so I guess is would be more difficult than it looks like.

But I like the part where he starts everything by seedlings. He's logic behind this is very understanble, BUT I am woudering in short growing season's countries if it is really necessary. Well I guess a big green house would be necessary. But the transplanting time...ouch!!! When you are alone, it is a great job.

Isabelle

Hey Isabelle... Jeavons book was my first reading back in the days and it gave me intro of many important aspects of gardening, especially soil, even tough it advocates digging.
Jeavons cares a lot about soil.
Beside, my father was a double diger for 20+ years and i learned a lot from him, sometimes it's not just about soil, it's also about those many small details while spending time in garden.

What i picked the most from Jeavons is plant spacing and patterns of planting/sowing - it works great.

BUT, at the same time i learned Ruth Stout's method, lasagna gardening, Fukuoka.
They were my heros and i was just convinced about no-dig.

Shortly after that i also found out about Emilia and she put it all so cleary toghether - it was in a way a mixture of Jeavons and Fukuoka, just what i needed as i was also influenced by them the most.
So she became my greatest veggie gardening guru. :)

Diging made sense for me only with preperation of new garden, let say on hard compacted soil, not having enough organic matter to start with etc.
I prepared a lot of gardens Emilia way, taking soil from paths onto garden surface and then never dig again.

BUT, then almighty Charles hit the surface ... i will never dig again, really.
As he say, put your energy and time into finding enough organic matter to put on top.
That's what i do now if i play with new surfaces.
Charles puts compost on top and let it be bare and doesn't mulch as he has problems with slugs.
His method can help a lot of people!

---

no dig - one year old cow manure spread 15cm on top of grass in fall - easy to plant and sow in spring in fine tilth and no need to mulch







---

I don't have slug problem so most of the time i mulch.
In established garden i mulch all the time with leafmold, compost, short fresh grass, rotten hay - i never let soil get bare - and most of the time i strive for mulch that will be composted as soon as possbile, so planting and sowing is possible and easy all the time.
Harder to decay mulch such as leaves, long grass and hay i put on paths where they decay, take care of weeds and later they go on beds when they are mostl broken dow and showing signs of humus.
I leave as much organic veggie and weeds waste on beds.
Weed's roots are discarded on paths.
If it's not root crops i leave all roots in soil after harvest.
I weed little and often when weeds are very small.
And all other tiny details... :)

Take care!

Good morning Aljaz,

I do basically the same thing as you do. But one thing I did wrong (I think) is the preparation of the bed. I think I would have had less problem preparing the beds using Jeavons technic then using Emila's. But instead, I put cardboard and straw last summer and this spring, dig the trenches and put the soil on top. Except that everything under the cardboard is not totally death...a lot of grass.

I will buy Jeavons E book. I really am intersted in is technic. I started seedlings yesterday to put on the bed around june 24th. It will still have time to grow (cucomber, salad, rapinis etc.)

I mulch a lot with straw. I notice since not all my garden is mulch, that everywhere I don't have straw, my plants are eaten...hiorrible. It is very dry right now and I don't watered. I let the plant go deep in the soil to take the water. But where I don't have mulch, I guess it is harder for them. They are still very nice, but the bugs like it also.

Thanks for the tips and for let me know about Jeavons. A nice discovery for me.

isabelle

PS I wanted to put pix but it seems I can't used image shack anymore...any other place I can go?

ONe question...

I just bought the book. I will read it more carefully to night, but can't find the info I was looking at. Does he strats his carrots in flats like the other crops? Can we transplant the seedlings?

Isabelle

I think if you can maintain sufficient mulch (especially a good cover for winter) that no till (no dig) is the way to go. I'm trying that moving forward and am hopeful.

Isabelle Gendron wrote:Does he strats his carrots in flats like the other crops? Can we transplant the seedlings?

I never do it, it's much easier to direct sow and transplanted carrots can result in poor harvest.
He does both.

Thanks

Isabelle

We tried a synergistic garden in heavy clay soil and are currently abandoning it and looking to other options.

We had good results in the first year when the soil was newly broken and worked over. In the second year everything seized up, compacted, and we started investigating using a fork and hoe, calcium and compost. This seems to work a little better.

The theory of plants creating an abundance of root mass and life-enriching biomass just didn't work out for us as well as we hoped.

Friends of ours who set up their synergistic beds at the same time had to completely redesign in the second year for much of the same reasons.

There are climate, micro-climate, and soil biology factors that, for us, override whatever miracles Emilia was able to produce in her climate, micro-climate, and soil biology. Our worst nightmare right now is Emilia adding plant starters with a spoon.

Whatever advances we have made with the soil seems most attributable to compost, calcium, woodchips, a broadfork and a hoe.

William

William,

I can understand your problem. here, my soil is kind of hard too. Every spring I had compost on top of the bed and straw, without working the soil really. I hope that by doing so, year after year it will become better.

Isabelle

William, have you left soil bare at any time of the year?

Aljaz Plankl wrote:William, have you left soil bare at any time of the year?

Nope. Always covered with plants, straw or chip.
W

Okey, thanks for sharing.
I guess straw doesn't provide enough for hard clay soil.
In years of mulching i have found out that the best mulch is partly rotten, compost almost.
Charles Dowding started his one acre garden on clay soil, with compost/one year old manure on top.
Compost on top is one of the best options.

no-dig garden at my place...

Aljaz Plankl wrote:Okey, thanks for sharing.
I guess straw doesn't provide enough for hard clay soil.
In years of mulching i have found out that the best mulch is partly rotten, compost almost.
Charles Dowding started his one acre garden on clay soil, with compost/one year old manure on top.
Compost on top is one of the best options.

Yeah, I've been thinking that lately too. Thick dressing of compost, redressed pretty often. The quality and source of the compost becomes important too.
That would work at 200 sq meters or a little more. Outside of that it gets to be hard work and input heavy, unless you have a lot of free help and biomass.
W

It's one sort of Atriplex hortensis. It self seeds prolifically and can be used as green living mulch from late march on. It's used as spinach.

William, this year i mulch mainly with compost and leafmold.
Leafmold cuts down the amount of compost used for half.
Leaves are easy to transport, are widely available everywhere in fall and can be made in leafmold with regular turning very fast.

Aljaz Plankl wrote:William, this year i mulch mainly with compost and leafmold.
Leafmold cuts down the amount of compost used for half.
Leaves are easy to transport, are widely available everywhere in fall and can be made in leafmold with regular turning very fast.

Yeah. This seems like the way to go. I think with this technique in time the soil under the compost would soften up, get black, and get soil life and air inside of it. There's a place nearby that is giving away woody compost, so It's going to figure strongly in future planting strategies, whatever we grow. And we now get regular leaf/grass dumps from our gardener friend, even too much to move quickly enough.
William

Well here, I don't know if it is the weather, but this year I have sooooo much snails. Mulch or no mulch is the same. Horrible. They are eating everything. At first I taught that they would pick one and left the rest, but héhéh no no no....they eat everything.


Isabelle

Isabelle Gendron wrote:this year I have sooooo many snails.

Plant more stuff. Or set up a beer bar and let them get boozed to death.
William

:p Like that.

I started seedlings in flats. I will transplant them this week.

Thanks
Isabelle

We are trying some sunken bed hugelkultur here in Vegas . will let everyone know how it turns out

Correction here...slugs, not snails...sorry.
Now, handpicking with my little one. Good feast pour the chicken.

Isabelle

One of the criticisms of the Hazelip technique is the straw=slugs argument. I found that when the slugs hit hard, they really don't care if you have straw or not. Some people believe that the straw makes them less mobile, I would agree with that, but the damage is pretty much the same, especially if your plants are tightly packed. Slugs=some plants being eaten. It doesn't go away until the conditions which gave rise to the slugs change, usually that means rainy period stops and violà slugs are around but not a huge threat. Oh, and slugs do have preferences most of the time. They'll only eat the good stuff, which is why we just throw more seeds and plants at the problem and some stick, slugs or not.

Handpicking is about the only thing that we found that worked against an onslaught, as annoying a truth as that might be. It's good that you now have some chicken food so the effort is not completely wasted. If you had snails recent research says that their homing device turns off after 20 meters, so just removing them from the garden could work.

William

Slugs have eaten on some of my collards but they can't eat fast enough.

The problem, is not everything is growing at the same rate. SO they have time...plenty. That is probably a good point to start everything in seedlings and transplant.

I also notice yesterday that my garlic leaves seems to have a little bug that does something like dust on it. Gotta do something today. What a year.

Isabelle

Enrique Garcia wrote:We are trying some sunken bed hugelkultur here in Vegas . will let everyone know how it turns out

Please do, at the rate my beds are shrinking I may have the same thing myself.

December 2014 - Taking Care of Established No-Dig Garden


Even in gray December we have a little spring taste. Spring salad set seeds, seeds hit the ground and i covered the bed with a bit of compost.
Germination was good, i thinned a bit and covered with fleece.
We already picked the outer leaves once and now we can do it again.
Lots of rain and cloudy days these year here, but growth is good anyway.
Nice addition to chicory salad bowl.


A nice woolen jumper for the garden bed.
In the back there is a garden bed covered with unfinished compost for peppers and tomatoes next year.
Next to the woolen bed on left side we have a challenge, grass path, constant invasion into the bed, we need to do something about it!
Leaves, cardboard cover before winter for sure.


No-Dig parsnips! :)
First time growing them, more of them next year for sure!


When we harvested late cabbage in September, we covered the bed with compost and planted winter oak leaf salad.
It needs harvesting now before winter!
We could've harvested it already, i have no idea why we didn't!


Althoug we have constant rain and moisture garden can be walked thanks to leaves on paths.

It's so nice and rewarding to see the preparation job done for the season 2015. :)

Good morning all,

Gardening is starting fast here this year. After the coldest winter ever summer is here faster than before. ONe day I was wearing my winter jacket and the day after, it was 26 outside.

Seedlings are going great but still waiting to put them in the bed. still a lot of rsk for freezing temp.

This is my garden for this year. Growing constantly. over 200 garlic plants. perennial herbs are out and growing. I notice after 3 years of bed culture that the weeds are changing. Dandelions ar still present but aren't strong. I can pull them out without digging and the entire roots is coming out. But a new one appear this year in good quantity..shepherd's purse. So I have to look for the significations. But the compost adding helped a lot. I started a compost pile Lawton's way but using my deep litter in the coop that started composting and that already contain manure, kitchen scraps peat moss and straw... I did a pile and added other kitchen scraps but I think I may miss some ¨green¨material. I will see that saturday when I turn it and see the temperature.


Oups!! No pix are showing. let me try something else...

Here's my garden.

Different parts of the world! Here is where I am at this point.

I'm just starting with using some of the Hazelip inspired techniques in my garden along with some hugel-mounds. I was turned onto the idea here in this thread, so I wanted to say thanks and post a quick pic of where I'm at with the process so far. My garden is still tucked away for the winter, but she's starting to wake up! I built the beds last fall, mulched the heck out of 'em with a one inch layer of steer manure compost covered with about a foot of spent hay, and let them cook for the winter. I made a couple different shape/style beds: one long bed going roughly N-S with a flat top, and several shorter mounded beds running E-W. I've notice that in the mounded beds the soil has a much nicer texture, really loose and crumbly. It is easily dug with my hands, while the flat topped bed took a little more work and was not nearly as crumbly. Anyway here's a quick picture of where we're at right now:

Here is 10 days later from my recent post. Plants are really taking
off. Tomatoes are setting fruit and we are eating squash. I am a token
corn grower due to lack of space but we enjoy what we get.