Things That Changed In Our Permaculture Garden

Six years ago we started building this garden. We designed it with permaculture principles and implemented the design as best as we could. Many things worked but some of them needed to be adjusted and some of them changed by themselves. Today we will look at a few of these quite interesting and unexpected changes. So let's start with an event that caused a series of changes to our garden. The thing I'm talking about is the extension of our chicken run. I built this fence two years ago with the intention to give our chickens a lot more space and to help with the work in the orchard. But this fence also opened up the possibility to integrate ducks into the garden. And as we already had a second pond this was an easy choice. The big advantage with ducks is that they eat all the slugs. The ducks can access these areas in the garden which is enough to keep the area in the middle free of slugs. Having no slugs in the garden opened more possibilities up in the vegetable garden. Now I can deep mulch the beds with hay and grass clippings which helps tremendously with weed control, fertility and water management. I need a lot less water and I need less compost and green manure to keep the beds fertile. Needing less compost then reduced the compost making activity in the chicken area. I make a lot less compost right now as I mostly need the compost for my seedlings, not in the vegetable garden anymore. Another thing that was caused by the extension of the chicken run was that the chickens have enough green to eat which is why the main chicken area almost completely greened up again. There's no need to mulch the area with hay anymore to keep the eggs clean as I had to in the first years. And I removed the small pond in the chicken area as they have access to the duck pond all the time now. But there's even more to this chain of events. As the fence not only defined the space for the animals it also defined a more clear area for us. From this point on we wanted the area in the center of the garden to be mowed and accessible all the time, especially for our kids. This then led me to switch my beloved reel mower to a battery-powered mower. A reel mower is simply not designed to mow an area this large. However, mowing with a lawnmower is time consuming and work that I do not enjoy that much. So it was quite interesting when my father offered me his old robotic lawnmower that he did not need anymore and asked me if I wanted to have it. I was skeptic at first as a robotic lawnmower and the permaculture garden do not really fit together. But I was also tired of lawnmowing so I thought about it and then decided to take it. The robot now mows this area. I still mow this area at the back of the greenhouse with my battery-powered mower. The rest stays as it is and is mowed with the scythe or the brush cutter twice a year. It is quite strange to say but I'm really happy to have the robot because it saves me about two hours a week which results in 60 hours a year which I can invest in building and growing other stuff. Our garden is still full of spot with nettles, herbs and wildflowers so I really think that a permaculture garden and a robotic lawnmower can fit together in terms of efficiency and maintenance work. But there is more that changed during the last years. Let's have another look at the vegetable garden. Here we always grew a lot of squash in summer. However, we realized that we do not need these amounts of squash. So we decided to not grow them anymore and replace them with a more valuable crop. And to us this crop are berries. So we separated the beds in the vegetable garden with a path in the middle and now grow strawberries, raspberries and blueberries on an area equivalent to the growing area of the squash. I still grow the same amount of vegetables. Now we have a mixed vegetable and berry garden. Another thing that changed are the trees and shrubs. Obviously they got a lot taller and bear a lot more fruit. I have to do a lot more pruning, shaping the trees and trimming the hedge. So most of the time that went into taking care of grasses in the first years now goes into taking care of trees. Which is a development I really like. Nothing better than harvesting apricots from the greenhouse roof and tasting apples directly from the tree. I also have so much woody material to work with now and I want to try different long-term composting methods with the new available tree material. Most of the changes that happened during the last years made the garden more efficient and reduced the amount of maintenance needed. The garden is slowly transitioning from the establishment phase to an early phase of stability. Which is really exciting. So is our garden complete or let's say finished now? No, absolutely not. There will always be new ideas for further development and part of the process is to accept that things will always change. And the next change is already at the doorstep and will be a big one. But more on that in the next video. Which is coming very soon. But until then, thanks for watching.