This Small-Scale Permaculture Garden is Packed With Food

Hello and a very warm welcome back to the garden. Today I'm going to show you my kind of different approach to harvesting. This is very much an abundant polyculture. Rather than going and harvesting for my food, I go and forage through the garden and I want to show you some of the really interesting things that are happening, maybe give you some ideas and some interesting plant combinations that have happened by accident because I've taken a very experimental approach which is very different to how this garden was last year. So the first thing that I spotted is that there are a couple of raspberries but what I want to talk about first is this is a globe artichoke, mainly in its first year and I've got the first globe here ready to harvest. It is such a delicacy and so that's going to be the first thing I'm going to enjoy. So that is going to be absolutely delicious. Now around me here there is so much food. I'm coming to the raspberries in a second but at the bottom of my feet I have some mint so that is absolutely delicious and then kind of hiding tons of rhubarb but everywhere around me is food. I've got here I've got peas and then of course the first of the autumn raspberries are starting to come out and these are going to be absolutely delicious. So this garden is trying to embrace as much diversity as possible and there are occasions where I will grow a bulk of something like potatoes or leeks and that's fine but wherever possible I try and integrate as many different things as possible and here so there's a lot going on. I've got some beautiful dahlias which I'm actually going to cut a couple to dry just because they are looking so so lovely. So look at those beauties. Pop those in there and then beneath me here I've got fordhook giant chard which in my last video I gave a nice little shout out and it really is an absolute giant and really tasty so I can grab like a couple of those leaves and what I do when I whenever I come to the garden and I'm thinking what shall I have for dinner I actually love this wild jungle look. Yes okay right it isn't as efficient as say creating things in blocks and making sure I don't have things spilling over into the pathways but it's so much more fun and it's that kind of joy that makes me like every time I come to the garden I'm like oh what's happening and and I've got squash and things growing under here and like you'd have no idea that right behind me is a things are hiding everywhere I can also just reach down wait for this got a beetroot so whilst it looks really wild this is true food abundance and for me with with permaculture it's kind of taking certain different principles and realizing that there's no rule book. I don't care about companion planting I think a lot of it is a little bit faddy to be honest so people are oh no you can't grow that plant with this I just disregard all of that I focus on soil health I focus on when I'm putting in plants how they kind of work in terms of spacing I'm like well is there just about enough space like putting those asparagus beans back there yeah they can just grow out and it creates this amazing kind of patchwork quilt of flavor and color. What always strikes me is and it happens every year but I can sometimes come to the garden and think oh there's not really much food but as soon as you actually get in and start looking at things you realize there's a lot now these plants are not perfect this here is asturian tree cabbage one of my absolute staples it's got a few little holes in it but at least I know it's organic and it's helping insects in fact I've been a lot of insect life especially in the last month it's like I felt a real boom and there's a lot of things happening under here I've got a courgette plant one courgette plant is more than enough for one person and then I've got rat's tail radish coming through now this area here is particularly exciting there is a lot going on I've got fruit gigantines beans I've got runner beans and the runner beans are coming on nicely and this is one of the coolest things ever you can eat runner bean flowers they just have the most like lovely refreshing bean taste so I recommend that and then up here I've also got a squash that is starting to grow and it's the same squash in that bed and it's growing in between the potatoes I don't mind and then of course brackets by black mint and there's a little cilantro underneath so that'll be actually quite nice for a salad so behind me here I've got this amazing nasturtium sending off lots of nice flowers lovely thing about nasturtium is that essentially the whole plant is edible so the leaves are edible the flowers are edible and then the seed heads nice and edible I'm just going to grab a couple of those that I can slice up nicely as a topping in the front here I'm actually going to do my first like mini harvest of cavolo nero kale this as this was where I was growing some potatoes actually I took out the potatoes and then I've done a bit of a mixed medley planting and so I'm going to take just a couple of leaves there and one leaf on here I don't want to take too much because all of these leaves are photosynthesizing and helping but one of the kind of the core things about having a garden like this and it really it really links into health it's like you want to be healthy you want to have as much diversity and variety of plants to eat and rather than worrying about say doing your five a day and trying to get the right quantities of that what I can do is a right medley the 20 to 30 different plants in a single meal time if I wanted to I'll give you a very quick example of how that can quickly kind of build up so here I've got peas growing so pea shoots is one example I've got shisho growing shisho is another example this here is a dwarf runner bean which will be interesting to see what happens this here is dill so I can add the dill in and then there's a couple of like little beetroot leaves and already like that I'm quickly getting that beautiful diversity it's like the idea of eating the rainbow I've got a little lettuce here so I could grab a couple of like little lettuce leaves and it is simple as that now here is a really interesting kind of semi-wild planting scheme I've put in an aster shim and a Vietnamese coriander and I've got this bronze fennel which is growing really really nicely and this is all like a mix and what I've noticed is that the Vietnamese coriander is almost using the bronze fennel as a little bit of a structure to go upwards and we've got the cascading effect of the nasturtium and the nasturtium is actually growing out the other side of the door which I quite like and this is one of my absolute favorite beds here I just wanted a bed of color and insect life and so we've got the monada or bergamot two different types growing this Korean agastache just smells absolutely amazing and then I've got yarrow this stunning kind of red yarrow different cosmoses and calendula and I've got a little zinnia here a little orange zinnia pink zinnia there is so much happening within this bed there's a lot of things tucked in and happening behind I've got a little bit of amaranth growing so I might want to add a few of these amaranth leaves in but it's keeping me kind of in terms of a permaculture garden I think it's so important to have not just edible polyculture but also visual polyculture and so incorporating flowers within the garden and ones that have edible purposes like if you wanted to you can eat the petals of zinnia they're a little bit bitter so use it sparingly but again it's just giving you options and then at the back here which is great I think got a thornless blackberry which is nice and that's a good one sometimes they're a little sour but that's looking good you want to see what's happening in here I'm going to start to make my way I've got the pot beds here lots of spaghetti squash jumbo pink banana squash this is actually quite interesting this is where I've got some sweet peas growing and this is a perennialized runner bean in a sense so I managed to overwinter the tubers and I've been harvesting the runner bean but it's also growing in between the sweet peas which I quite like that I quite like to see that behind is a Japanese wineberry and I'm just making my way through I've got iced broccoli and yes it's a little bit of a pain making my way through but it is a lot of fun now in the back here this tree spinach I actually cooked it the other day when making some lunch and it is a it's just a really nice flavor I think this is going to be for me moving forward one of my bulk greens in a way even though it's got this beautiful magenta tip it's one it's going to be one of my bulk kind of crops for greens that I'm going to eat and then in the back here I've just let it go into kind of just crazy polyculture city I've also got some verbena boryensis growing here just for the butterflies and various different perennials I'm not going to focus too much on the perennials today but in the front here I have a massive angelica this is yacon that is that is growing through and then I'm also growing this purple tree spinach which actually would be quite nice to add to the mix so throwing all of these and I've got this abundance and there's so many different squash hiding underneath my feet this is getting bigger and then in there I've got ochre and Chinese artichoke and yeah it is it is absolutely it looks like chaos but it's design chaos sometimes I will see something maybe growing too far or too much over something so like this angelica leaf at the bottom is kind of inhibiting the yacon so I'm just going to cut that and basically chop and drop just to give a little bit of extra space for this yacon to really thrive so here in the polytunnel finally this this had a lot of slug issues one of the things I put down was strulch which does make a really nice effect but everything's grown I've just been filling in some extra things this is either amaranth I think this is amaranth but I've been planting some callaloo as well this is one cucumber plant that I've trained into a set of three I've got some beautiful cucumbers and I've been having a lot of beautiful ones behind here hiding is a aubergine and then a cornichon or however you say it cucumber the tomatoes are going great guns it's taken them quite a while with all of my tomatoes both the ones that I've done as normal cordons and these wild ones like this here is one plant and trained it into two black strawberry looking really good and what I've started to do is clear the base and under plant tomatoes now I've been chatting about under planting tomatoes in my in my latest journal but the idea is if I've got all of this space at the bottom I don't want to be redundant I always want to think about how can I maximize it so I've put in some kind of low grain plants just to make sure that the airflow remains nice but really halfway through this and the little winner for me was to see the melon starting to grow something called Greek basil now the squash has grown so well just decided to run a few meters and escape from the kitchen garden it's quite funny and this is the other side of the thornless blackberry if you want to see something pretty cool this is a golden tomato and this one as well and I put a runner bean in and the runner bean has grown up through well actually up the string missing most of the tomato plant and over the top so here I can have both the runner beans as a harvest and also the tomatoes so here I've got over 20 different edible things that I can enjoy and that very much is that kind of forage mentality of going around the garden seeing what's ready seeing what's in its prime I'll now take this home and use this to kind of design a meal I'll probably group different things together like you know the salad ingredients and then the root veg and things and the leafy greens but it's so simple it's so abundant and this is the kind of food that you can get out every single day if you want to learn more and go to the place where I'm diving much deeper into permaculture then check out my sub stack where I am also releasing the occasional recipe I'm going broke so I'll see you there