#2 The Beginning - Permaculture Market Garden From

Hi, we're Harriet, Mauro and this is Tofu and in 2021 we bought four acres of land on the east coast of Spain with a dream of living a simpler, more sustainable life, in tune with nature, the seasons and above all our values. Join us as we try and bring our beautiful land back to productivity, restore our little stone cottage and learn how to make a living on our land. I'm really excited because I've got here a package from Mike from Fuera de Campo. He's sent me some seeds. I'm struggling to get into this. I've lost my little knife. This is why I'm making such a mess of getting into this. A stray seed. I don't know what this is. There's some soap, jabón natural, more jabón natural. Tofu, what are you sniffing? I can see some seeds at the bottom here. A tree propagator. I've never seen one of these. I don't know what this is. Wow. Oh, I know what this is. This is a luffa. I think this is where the stray seed came from. Oh, this is so cool. I really wanted to grow a luffa. Oh, this is amazing. Yeah, tofu. It's really exciting, isn't it? There are so many seeds in here. I can't believe it. This is like a birthday or something. This is amazing. Okra, cilantro, tomatoes, yantén, which is plantain, parsley, perejil, caigua. Okay, I don't know what that one is. A calabaza, a pumpkin, girasol, a sunflower, guayaba rosa. I don't know what that is. Sandia melón, that is a watermelon. A selga roja, that is a red and green, roja y verde. What do you call that? A selga. Chard, tomate almería, girasol tradicional, sunflower. Okay, we've got a problem. Come on, out you get. You want a box, do you? I haven't given you a box, have I? I need to give you a box. Okay, you can have this box once it's empty, I promise. There's so much stuff here. He's even sent these little kits of wooden cutlery. And there's so many seeds, all collected from local places, from different areas of Spain. It's amazing. Honestly, my mind is blown. We don't really have a seed collection here yet as such. Hopefully this is going to start off our more local seed collection with more, you know, heritage, local varieties, which is what we really want to be growing. So I'm just so blown away by this. I can't wait to plant all of these. Mike, thank you so much. If you've been watching this channel for a little while, you'll know that one of my dreams for this smallholding is to start a market garden and sell high quality organic produce direct to consumers. I've got really small ambitions at the moment and I'm really just spending as much time as I can learning about growing food in this climate, working with our land, planting trees, improving our soil and just experimenting. I do plan to document this whole process wherever it leads me. And in this video, I would just like to show you where we are at the moment, at the very beginning of what is going to be a long journey. Although we've had this land for over a year now, I only managed to get our water source connected a few months ago. So last year we were very limited in water and we were actually only growing a tiny patch of squash and beans in front of the house. I fixed the water in December 2021. So it was at that point kind of too late to start growing much for the winter. So now a few months later at the beginning of spring 2022, this really feels like the beginning. The plan for this year is to grow mostly for ourselves as much as we possibly can, maybe give some surplus away and basically see how much we can get out of the small space that we plan to cultivate this year and just learn as much as we can. I'm trying to grow all the things that we love to eat, plus lots of things I've never tried before, as well as a lot of flowers and perennials to help the pollinators and create a more biodiverse garden. I really like the crazy jam-packed mixed up beds of the French potager style gardens. So that's mostly what I'm going for at the moment. I'm not sure how efficient these kinds of beds would be for profitable market gardening. I don't know. I guess we'll see. But that's not really the point at the moment. This year I'm just having such a lot of fun doing something I've always wanted to do and never had the space, the land or the time to do. Look at this. Here in my worm compost, looks like we've got a couple of tomatoes growing. Two or three. I haven't had much luck with tomato germination in seed trays, probably because it's been so cold and I don't have a proper greenhouse. So I'm not going to let those three go to waste. I think what I'm going to do is move these ones that have germinated into another pot, free up some space in the seed tray and see if I can find room for them in the little greenhouse thing that we've got. I think I can probably take these calendula out now. They seem to do all right outside of the greenhouse. So that could free up some space. I think we've got space in the greenhouse for at least one more tray now that I've taken the calendula out. So I'm going to go through my cat food seeds, which were sent in a cat food box, which is great. No judgment, reuse things. I love that. And see what we've got, which might need, yeah, the heat of the greenhouse for germination. Oops. I just dropped the whole packet of basil upside down. Okay, I think I'm going to just try and plant all of these seeds. All right, there we go. I think we've got pretty much all the available space now taken up with pots, seed trays. The greenhouse is full, almost full. And I'm especially excited to see this little cucumber germinating. I love cucumber. I love using it in all sorts of things. So I'm really excited about this. So this is the garden at the moment. This whole row of beds is fully planted. Some stuff has been in since the winter and some stuff is recently planted in the spring. I'm just finishing off bordering all of the beds with stones. I started bordering them with bits of wood, but because we're watering with a hosepipe at the moment and we're dragging the hosepipe around, that was just like knocking the wood out of place. It wasn't heavy enough. So I'm in the middle of the arduous task of bordering all of the beds with stones. That's obviously not like a solution that we're going to do for the entire field because that's a lot of work and a lot of stones. And although we do have a lot of stones that we can drag out of fields, it would take me a long time. So we'll try other things in other areas of this field. But for this row, I just thought it would look really nice with the stones bordering everything. So much I can find my way. We got everything here, at least to stay alive. Everything does look pretty messy. We've got some weeding to do in here. I have been trying all sorts of different methods with no dig, dig, shallow tilling, cardboard, no cardboard to see what's working well. So some beds are weedier than others, the ones where I didn't lay cardboard particularly. And also because the boundaries of the beds when they were made with wood, that wasn't a very solid boundary and it allowed a lot of grass and weeds from the pathways to encroach. You can see here what I mean about the wood not being a very good barrier or separator between the garden and the path. I don't mind the weeds in terms of aesthetics, but in a few places they're encroaching a bit and kind of smothering a few of the very small plants that we've planted out. So it does need to be tidied up just for that reason. But yeah, I'm really happy with this row of beds. I love the mix of things that we've got going on. I love the flowers. I'm picking things from these beds every day, which is really nice. And I can't wait until we've expanded this two or three more times in this direction and got this whole field full of beds. I'll try and give you a rough idea of what's growing here. We've got strawberries and garlic and a few calendula flowers. We've got in the next bed a mix of broccoli, artichoke, calendula, aceragas, lettuce and cabbage. The next bed back we've got the same and you can kind of see the olive tree growing in the middle of that bed. We've then got two beds of kale. From this angle you can see a bit more clearly the bed of kale, more kale and alfalfa, which I'm just trying out as a green manure. We'll see what happens there. We've then got a bed of morellos. Then we've got a bed of radishes and spinach. Then a bed of garlic and finally a bed of broad beans. Oh, and all the beds are currently interplanted with a row of spinach down the middle. I've just finished bordering this bed with stones, this third bed along and I think I'm going to go and do something else now because something very exciting has just happened and has completely distracted us from this task of bordering the beds. I've just finished bordering the beds. This is three tonnes of manure from a local farm. It's a mix of goat and chicken manure in varying states of decomposition. We'll compost a lot of it to get it to break down completely and some of it we will add to beds directly. Some of the beds that we're not going to be planting in just yet to give it a bit of time to break down a little bit more. We paid €80 for this delivery of three tonnes. I'm really excited that it's here. It's our first big delivery of off-site compost. This is really going to help get things started. This is what we needed to expand our growing area because at the minute I've just been using compost that we've been creating here, which is obviously limited in how much we can produce. We don't have animals at the moment. I'm really excited to compost this, use it, learn how to get the most out of it and see what we can grow over the next couple of years in this. We've just been pulling all of these old roof tiles out of the ruin behind me. We're trying to reuse them as the borders of the garden beds. These were in a very awkward location. I think we've got them all now though. I just need to move them to the road so that we can actually wheelbarrow them down to the house. Well, here we are. These are the final beds that we just finished making with the roof tiles. They've both got a layer of manure underneath, dug into the ground, the cardboard and the straw. That finishes off the two rows of beds that I've been trying to get finished for this spring. The aim is to have this whole field dug into beds, but I'm not going any further than these two lines at the moment because this is as far as the hose can stretch from the water deposit there. It won't stretch any further, so I wouldn't be able to water any further with the hose. I need to put drip irrigation in place for any further beds, so that will be the subject of a future video. But yeah, I've got plenty of space now ready for all the plants that I've got started. Okay, I really need to move this pile of manure today because if you've seen where we are and recognised this area from other videos, we are directly in the place where I need to reverse the car and I'm going to need to do that ideally tomorrow, if not definitely the day after. So this needs to go. As I've said on other videos, one of the disadvantages of this site, I mean nowhere's perfect, and the thing that's not perfect here is the space for parking, bringing in vehicles, deliveries, that sort of thing. So we end up in this situation a lot, getting a vehicle in, delivering a large, bulky delivery, and it just has to go somewhere inconvenient and we have to move it fairly quickly. That's just what we're dealing with here. I've also got here six more pallets. I picked them up for one euro each at a nearby agricultural co-op, and a bit more cardboard for more beds, for the cardboard layer in the beds that we're building. We've been doing some really cool stuff with pallets lately, which I'm excited to show you in another video, but these pallets in particular are for extending some of our compost areas, so that we can compost a lot of this manure because it's not all fully composted and I would like to compost it properly before using it in beds where we're growing right now. Day two with the manure pile. It's not such a nice day today, but this has got to be done because I still need to go out with the car, so let's do this. We're getting there. Maybe you can't see much difference, but I think we're almost done. Well, I think that's it for this video. Thank you so much for watching, as always. I can't believe that we're almost at 10,000 subscribers. Maybe we'll actually be at 10,000 by the time you watch this video, so thank you so much. It really is crazy and means the world to us that people want to follow this journey and watch us fail in a million different ways, but thank you so much. We love reading all your comments every week. We love seeing your support and your tips and your advice. That makes us really happy, so thank you so much for that. I hope to get better at these videos so I can carry on producing them and make them better and produce more of the stuff that you like to see. One final thing before I go, because I know lots of you will be thinking it. You've just seen me move three tonnes of manure by hand and you're probably thinking, wow, those guys really need a tractor. I just want to answer that comment. I don't know if I'll answer it very well, but we don't have a tractor and we don't have plans just yet to get one. They're quite expensive, but that's not really why. Mostly we're just really early on in this project and we're learning so much all the time. I wouldn't know what kind of tractor to get, what our needs would be if we were going to get a tractor. I also want to try and figure out how we can do a lot of the things that we need to do here without fossil fuels, integrating animals and things like that to do some of the heavy work and to perform some of the functions that we need performing here. Obviously I don't know anything about anything, so it'll be a learning journey, but I'm not going to rush into getting a tractor until we've had a go at looking at how we can do more, I guess, holistic, sustainable, truly sustainable in the sense that these systems could carry on indefinitely into the future no matter what happened in the world without depleting resources and relying on fossil fuels. So that's what we are interested in trying to learn more about, and that's why we're not going to rush into getting a tractor. Maybe we'll borrow one to do one or two odd tasks that we need. But yeah, I just thought I would answer that point before we go because otherwise I'll just end up writing it 50 times in the comments. Anyway, thanks again so much for watching and I'll see you next time.