The Peacocks’ FoodForest
August 11, 2010
Keepin’ bugs and headaches at bay with feverfew and cayenne
July 3, 2010
Looks like it’s gonna be an exceptional blackberry year
June 25, 2010
For those who have phobias of runners and love small, pixie fruits, behold the Alpine strawberry
May 13, 2010
A permacultureist’s palette- beauty, unity, practicality, and super charged in the flow of nature
April 30, 2010
I will have le salad de fennel, chard, and calendula. Delicious!
April 2, 2010
Fresh, juicy spring at its finest. Columbines pink and sweet to taste, onion blossoms beckoning bees, furry fennel tickling faces.
Fresh, juicy spring at its finest: pink columbines sweet to taste, onion blossoms beckoning busy bees, furry fennel tickling faces
Yummy plant guild: Curry leaf tree (Murraya koenigii), Swiss chard, garlic, Dittany of Crete, peas, Italian parsley
Week 12
March 27, 2010
Hanging out with Dave Jacke (Author of Edible Forest Gardens Vols. I & II), Ethan Roland (Appleseed Permaculture) and friends
Week 11
March 20, 2010
Banana flowers… Can’t wait to eat these as well as the fruit! Situated just high enough to be completely unnoticed by peafowl.
Week 6
February 12, 2010
Through all the rain, the foodforest held up beautifully. Fruit trees protected young sprouts, mounds absorbed inch after inch, and peacocks went about their peripheral nibbling.
We managed to finally make our way to zone 5, the lesser traveled area of the garden. After months of neglect, our curiosities got the best of us. What does the soil look like now adays? What thrived below ground. Last year around this time we had planted a few sweet potatoes, which had made a beautiful blanket over the area.
Alice in Wonderland, a.k.a. zone 5
Blackberries, too, had inched their way, sucker by sucker, from zone 4 into zone 5.
In addition to the sweet potato, blackberries, nasturtium, mustard, and fenugreek, grapes had sprawled out. Wanting to utilize their vines in an attractive way, which minimized space, we had partially conceived of an arbor. The space just called out for a tunnel of some sort. And now that things had grown in a bit, it was finally the perfect time.
Gifts from nature: We’ve never sown nasturtium.
Strolling about looking for curvilinar pieces of wood, we found beautiful items to work with. A stump here, a wizard’s cane there, and a little bit of wire, and viola! A little tunnel ready to host an outcropping of grapes. We can already taste them!
A place for grapes, a lovely shape, a few months time and it’ll be like a cape
Week 5
February 5, 2010
Homage to seeds. With a little water from the skies and a lot of nutrients from the sun, transformation is sure to take place
A heavy week of merriment in the garden, we spruced up and planted much. With all of the clippings available, we decided it was the perfect time to apply our annual givings of mulch to the garden. Generous bucket after bucket, new mounds and contours were set in place.
Seedlings we had started months ago were ready to set out. Nasturtiums of all colors are throwing themselves whereever they can. The sweet alyssum has opened her eyes again and is looking as fairy-like and as cute as ever. Tomatoes happily keep doing their thing. Arugula, sweet bitter arugula is popping up all over the pathways! And celery too!
New spiraling patterns are naturally coming together. And its all looking a bit like the first inclings of spring time…
Week 4
January 29, 2010
The mating season for peacocks has just begun and Peacock’s FoodForest finally played this week. Our friends at Barnhart School came by to check up on the FoodForest, to see what they could expect from a permaculture garden in January, the low point in Southern California’s growing season.
Is this a dream or is that peacock fanning its feathers at us?
While most veggie gardens one might see around town have probably hit the dust by now, time to rip everything up, make it bare and start again, it was lush and green in our neck of the woods. Why? It’s not magic. When you plant everything together: trees, shrubs, vines, roots, veggies, flowers, you will constantly have a full and beautiful garden.
Most of those types of plants are perennials, meaning that they live on from year to year. We look for long-lasting vegetables, long-lasting everything in the garden. Um, but why?
Well, we wouldn’t have nearly enough time to carry on with all the other projects SayPermaculture! has got up our sleeve if we had to keep starting over in the garden three or four times a year.
Not to mention, we don’t know about you, but we’ve never seen those types of veggie gardens in nature. Nor have we ever seen little gardeners complete with pruning shears and bottles of herbicides and pesticides that are spontaneously reborn in nature to take care of such gardens.
Taking nature as our guide, we emulate her and take delight in her wishes with our co-help.
Beautiful, delicious, and sustainable
So, with our annual spreading of mulch to keep nourishing the soil while our FoodForest is still young, we pruned and kept our clippings right on site. We keep building the Forest up: in soil, in seed, in observations, and love.
A patch of new mushroom species popping up amongst nasturtium and sweet potato
Week 3
January 22, 2009
In your garden and in ours, this week it was all about water. And finally, we got to the kind we adore most in the garden: rain water. Such an improvement we noticed this year in our permaculture garden over last.
Where’s the mulch? Chakras (wheels) of rain drops making a small pool.
In terms of keeping rain in the garden to let it seep in, instead of watching it flow downslope and away, we did scores better than the previous year. Most water will just slick right off clay soil with no mulch. A garden resplendent with mulch will keep the water locked in place right where you want it-underground.
A brief glimpse of sunlight
As tribute to our real workers in the garden, the pollinators, we include a monthly review on what’s been flowering. In any permaculture garden, we want to make sure our pollinators have plenty to feed upon all year long. This way, they’ll know they’ve got a reliable place to come and you’ll reap the benefits in productivity. You can do the same in your garden, just do check once a month to make sure you’ve got flowers in bloom all around the garden.
Alpine strawberry flowers
What’s been flowering this month:
-Quince
-Ginger plant ( something riperian, Africa. Check back soon.)
-Holy basil
-Thai basil
-Tomatoes (left over from way back when, still harvesting too)
-Oregano
-Calendula
-Nasturtium
-Feverfew
-Alpine strawberries
-Malvaviscus arboreus
-Shungiku (edible chrysanthemum)
-Fennel
-Blackberry
-Alyssum
What did we harvest this week?
1.9 lbs of the following:
-Collards
-Kumquats
Leafy tickets to health
January, a time of stunning sunrises
Week 2
January 15, 2010
With no special undertaking of our own, other than creating a hospitable edible forest, We’ve noticed new wildlife in the garden this week, more than We’ve ever seen before.
Beautiful new variety of mushroom fruiting under our espaliered blackberry vines
We think back to last year at this time. The garden really was just clods of clay, a big rose bush (3 Sisters), and a couple of gnarly Swiss chard plants. When we took a big shovel to the soil to break it open, we found no worms, no life, nada.
The top of the soil? Well, it follows that part was squeaky clean too. With a broom and lots of stomping all over it, just to get every last weed and leaf, nothing was left to generate life.
When looking around at your garden or even public plantings along the center divider where you drive, see if it matches that if the soil top is wiped clean of debris, clippings, or mulch, see if underneath the soil is wiped clean of organisms as well. Think of the implications.
We don’t need a shovel at all to get plantings in today. Why? Because we have a fat, I mean can’t get through the doorway fat layer of mulch and clippings that is constantly breaking down and enriching the soil. And when we stick our hands in the earth, she is crawling with worms. She breaths and we see her white mycelial network running along everywhere.
This week we saw two new strains of mushrooms pop up, never seen before in the garden. When we see mushrooms fruit in the garden, we know that we’re doing something right and rejoice.
We barely noticed these ones near the fava beans
We can already tell that this year’s going to be amazing to watch and help co-create in the garden, along with, and foremost, nature’s wishes indicated via microclimates, weather, microorganisms, pollinators, peacocks and other small animals.
Feathery fennel and other goods from the garden
What did we gather this week?
5.8 lbs of:
-Arugula
-Fennel
-Salad Burnet
-Swiss Chard
-Stevia
-Holy Basil
We also are conducting a formal seed ball experiment. Want to know the details? Find out in person during our upcoming event where you’ll also learn how to make your own FoodForest resplendent with worms and mushrooms on January 30!
Seed ball experiment. Find out the exciting results on Jan 30!
Week 1
January 5, 2010
You might all be interested in learning about the basics of the garden before I get into the exciting details of what happened this week:
Juvenile peacock impressing everyone and everything with his baby feathers
Peacock’s FoodForest particulars:
Location: Arcadia, California
Orientation: Westerly
Dimensions: 55′ long x 16′ wide
Age: currently 51 weeks young
Hydrated by: a Rainbird sprinkler irrigation system (arrgh) and supplemental ollas
Mulched in: 1. homegrown and in-situ, 2. Zeke the Sheik’s magical mulch, 3. and a Kellog spec. mulch
Nibbled on by: approximately 20 peafowl (the perimeters at least), other small birds, countless families of urban critters, but mostly by yours.