The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Vegetables => Topic started by: pgkevet on August 14, 2014, 01:31:13 pm
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I was thinking the other day that i f I had a tad more energy it'd be cool to experiment with a 'wild veggie path' i.e stick a mix of heritage varieties of all the stuff I grow in a real mix-up planting as opposed to rows and see if it could keep going by self seeding etc. that is just pick or dig up the ocassional veg as needed and see if the rest can avoid becoming one disease ridden mess and keep going, perhaps with an ocassionl bit of help if soem weeds try to overcome it....
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A lot of the permaculture enthusiasts use this type of polyculture. If you google Ianto Evans polyculture it should come up with some useful info
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Alice Fowler has written a brilliant book called the Edible Garden which is all about that. I followed it this year in a small-ish patch, it works wonderfully! Using flowers as companion plants and it did my kale and chard wonders - as they are spread out, they dont all get attacked at once. Highly recommended!! ;)
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I was thinking more in terms of a mixture that would self propagate, srvice the intermix of weeds etc and be self sustaining with minimum interference (apart from some harvesting)
It's been an amazing year for growth - at least here. My cauliflowers have immense curds the red cabbage heads are like footballs, the calibrese is on it's third or fourth set of new heads and the PSB stems are bigger than my fat thumbs and I'm already harvesting fat parsnips a foot long and onions the size of those spanish ones. Considering I was whining about not being able to grow onions and parsnips last year....
The only trouble is the weeds are growing as well...