Get gardening!

The weather seems to have changed here overnight. The snow and ice have vanished and we've had some wonderful weather, time to get gardening again...

This is a garden I'm helping with in a village just outside Perth. My client there already has lots of great stuff on the go but just wanted a bit of help and advice to develop what she's doing further. I've been explaining a few of the ideas of working with Nature which Ruth and I have seen work so well during our eco travels: biodynamics, forest gardening and permaculture. It's brilliant that these can be applied at all scales - if it works for a farm it will work in your garden.

One area we are going to develop is the section down by the wheelbarrow in the photo above. This looks like a prime area to me, it gets plenty of light and has a handy stretch of fence to support climbing plants. We've started a narrow no-dig bed there for peas and beans. There's room for a fruit tree or two, I suggested planting a couple of nut trees further along as well. (I think nut trees will become more and more important at all scales as we move away from mono-culture grains through choice and necessity...) I've suggested that the area around the trees will be perfect for perennials such as herbs and fruit bushes, making a mini forest garden effectively.
Finally, I've been meaning to post up this photo of Ruth with a giant parsnip back at Barmolloch for ages.

It's always great to have Ruth on hand for advice. She's the one who does all the reading; she'll read three or four books about a plant before growing it, taking a kind of average of all the information and mixing that with her own intuition. Whereas for me, it's no doubt a man thing, but reading a book or a manual is absolutely the last resort...