We are Quitting this Permaculture Method for Good! (Back to Eden)

Hey friends, I'm about to go outside and show you our back to Eden bed before it's gone. But I wanted to show you what I have working on today. So I have in here a kohlrabi in a beet that I chopped up really finely into little slivers and I have it in a pickling brine and I also just did our first batch of pickles. So this is pickled banana peppers and I'm really excited. Really excited about that. Chris and I both love banana peppers. I also have something else going on. I bring back my onions every year when the greens get really tall so that it allows onions to send more energy to their roots and they don't fall over. And so this year I'm using the green onion tops for onion powder. So I have onion tops in here chopped up and they're dehydrating. I'll have them go for about, I don't know, 12 hours or so and then I'll check on them and see how they're doing. They'll probably need more like 18 hours to really dehydrate well and then I'll throw them in the blender, blend it up into a powder and they'll be ready to add to meal recipes. This guy is going to help me plant some zucchini in our back to Eden bed. And we've been procrastinating planting anything in that bed because it was just way too much work. I'm going to go tell you about the many reasons why we are quitting the back to Eden gardening method as far as our annuals go. So let's go. Let's go outside and get some stuff planted in that bed for the last season. Next season we will not be planting in back to Eden. That's for sure. Let's do it. Right here in the garden I've got my little garden snack. I actually really like these. These little vegan protein bars. They're good for pregnancy because I can fuel up, fuel up. Okay, so let's grab the zucchini tray and bring it over here and we're going to get planting in this bed. Just one tray left. It's got four starts there and we're going to plant three of those in the back to Eden bed. Smoochie. Turn your face to the camera. This is Sagey. We're going to go grab some compost from our compost pile to plant in with the squash. So let's go find a bucket. Let's try to get it in the camera. And do that. Do you want to be in the camera? I'm really close to the camera. The real question is how many tomatoes do we have growing in this compost pile? So many tomatoes. Do you think you need a full bucket? No. I agree. It's pretty good looking. Like it's really dark. Yeah. Tomatoes like it. I swear I'm having tomatoes grow everywhere this year. Is it only tomatoes? Yes. It's only tomatoes. Just because of the mulching or the milling you did of them? Yeah. Because of my tomato paste adventures. These are like microgreens. Honestly, if you could eat tomato greens, it would be great because they are microgreens. They're so, what is it though? Just lacking in sunlight you think? Oh yeah. They're just so light. It's just so light. It's because there's no sun back here. So we've got three zucchinis and they're going to go about two and a half to three feet apart. I'm just planting them right like that. Chris is going to plant them for me. There's a good reason why. So last year when setting up our gardens, we almost set up the entire garden to be back to Eden. So all of the beds except for one were basically just wood chips over cardboard on top of our lawn. Last year, it was the first year we planted anything. So everything was pretty stunted. Everything was slow growing. We still had a good garden, but it was obvious that there was some issues and there were some clear issues specifically in the back to Eden beds, whereas our Ruth Stout bed, which we planted our tomatoes in and potatoes in, did super well. Our tomatoes were really happy. The soil was really nice. It was easy to plant in. So this year we hit April, May, we're getting ready to plant, and I noticed just a pretty significant difference in the soil quality as well as the ease of planting in the back to Eden beds as comparison to our Ruth Stout beds. So in all the other beds where we had wood chips previously, we actually didn't add more wood chips. We just added hay on top, except for this one bed that we're planting in. This is the bed where we added more wood chips on top. About a month and a half ago, I planted cabbages and onions and beets in this area right here. Then I went and decided, okay, I'm not planting any more onions in this bed. I'm way too wiped out. It was so exhausting planting in the wood chips because every time I had to plant, I had to brush aside the wood chips, and it was like four inches deep, and you'd go to plant and immediately wood chips would start falling in the hole, so you're trying to get the wood chips out of the hole. And then the wood chips fall back in the hole, and you're trying to get them out of the hole. It was so much work. It was so exhausting. It was not fun at all. And I was like, okay, well, you know, eventually they'll grow really well. They'll be really happy. But I went on with things, and I decided to utilize other garden space first. And so I planted onions in our roost-out bed. I planted onions in one of our berms. And I just decided to see how things went. Well, I quickly found that the onions planted in the other areas have grown faster, they've been healthier, and they were way easier to plant. Just for reference, these are the onions growing in this bed, and they're much bigger, much healthier than the other ones growing in the back-to-eat-in bed. Ew, it's disgusting. Guys, this slug is so big. I'm showing the camera. Oh, it's so big. Yikes. Okay. You gonna give us the chickens? Not leaving them in the garden, that's for sure. Those leopard slugs, man. They get me every time. They are so big. They're so gross. They wreak havoc on our plants. So I'm going to show you guys the process of planting in these beds, and I want to show you what the soil looks like. And then I'm going to take you over to our roost-out bed and show you what the soil looks like there. Because there's a pretty significant difference in planting, soil health, and ultimately in plant growth. Let me show you what this planting process looks like. Not fun. So we've got this zucchini right here. He's going to move it out of the way, and now he's going to start brushing aside the woodchip. You know, it's like, okay, there's that initial layer. Now this is zucchini number three, and I probably could have planted like at least five or six in another area. Okay, so we've got these three zucchinis planted. We have one more to plant over here. You can see the soil. Let's actually save this soil in this tray, and let's bring it over and compare it to the soil in the roost-out. Okay, so I'm just going to show you guys. I'm going to dig around here just to show you how easy it is to plant, and then I'm going to scoop some of this soil in the same tray, and we're going to compare how the soil looks and feels and talk a little bit about that. Okay, so if you look at this soil right here, it's pretty loose for sure. I mean, this is like very loose stuff comparatively, right? No rock-hard soil. There's lots of little worms and creatures in there. So it's a pretty good size already. This isn't even a hardneck. This is a softneck. Wow. Yeah. Look at this guy. I know. That's what I was saying. Softneck in New York, and it's doing phenomenal. Look at that. That's huge. Okay, so we are sitting over here in the shade. Got this bin of soil, and I want to show you the difference between the back-to-eat and stuff. This is clay. Very heavy. It doesn't really break easily. This is what our native soil looks like, and it's still this saturated and heavy. I mean, I have to really use my hand muscles to break some of this stuff apart. You just see the difference. Now let's go over here. This is the same soil, much looser. It's a little lacking in water, but it's so much looser. Okay, so take a look at this soil. First of all, squirmy-wormy, but so loose, so healthy. So that's all just from no-till and from good mulching practices, as you can see right here. So the bottom line is, for us, we have moisture issues in the spring, and we have soil that likes to hold on to moisture. So using a system like back-to-eat-in, which really holds on to moisture, does not work for this, this soil. Now eventually it might. As the woodchips break down, they're less thick. As they feed the soil, we might see tremendous improvement. But this is just after two years. It's loose, it's easy to plant in, and the plants can absorb the nutrients from this soil. They can't really do much with this. It's too heavy. I was a big proponent of back-to-eat-in. I still think it works probably really well if you have a sandier soil, if you live in a drier climate. I think that you would probably see a lot more success. But we have a clay-like soil that's rich in nutrients, but hard and heavy. So we needed a method that would be better for us in terms of loosening the soil, and we found it with the rotted hay. We're also going to try out some no-dig and see how the no-dig method by Charles Dowding goes for us, because we have a slug issue, and hay is unfortunately a home for slugs. So we're learning as we go, and one day maybe we'll say, oh, roost out. Slugs, slugs, slugs. No-dig has been the answer we needed. And maybe we'll be quitting the roost-out method in a couple years. But definitely this method is not for me, for annuals. It's not for me. Our plants don't like it. I hate planting in it. I'm saying goodbye to the back-to-eat-in method. See you later. To your left is the Baguio Botanical Garden.