How to farm WITHOUT irrigation

What's up? Rupert here from Granite Permaculture coming to you from the Regenerative Living Hub in the beautiful Natural Bridge. It is July 2024. We're in the middle of the winter. We're getting our nice, wet, temperate, misty winter happening right now. And in this video I want to take you through a little process that I've done in setting up some gardens to grow some winter crops. And we're specifically going to focus on the timing of disturbance to then maximize the response and the growth pulse that comes after that disturbance. So we had the winter solstice event here on July, June 22. So about two and a bit weeks ago. And we got these two beds behind me all planted out with seedlings. Brassicas, onions, and lettuce, and coriander, and parsley, and chives. A whole mix of stuff. Now what did I do? I came through here. These beds were going senescent. It was tall, standing grass, lots of brown and yellow, and it wasn't much going on. I brush cut it hard, like right down to the dirt. Right, right down. Really, really hard in the week before. And it was quite dry at the time. And then I just left it. And then I collected some cow manure, some compost, and a whole bunch of stuff that we added in as we broad forked it. So we basically went through, broad forked each bed, added in this mix of stuff, a little bit of chicken pellets, and then we added some rotten mulch, sugarcane mulch, and then we added dry sugarcane mulch on that. Then we spread the hulls, planted all the seedlings. I watered them in because it was really dry. We watered them the next morning and the following morning. So three, three days of watering. Haven't touched them since. It's been two weeks. And we're very fortunate. I could sense there was a rainy period coming. I was like, we have to get this stuff in the ground. And I'm hoping the game is, right, if you're successful with farming, you don't have to irrigate because you're planting the right things at the right time for the right physical climatic context. And it will grow itself. So this garden behind me hasn't been irrigated for years. Like we set it up in the dry time, we just never use it, partly because it's manual and partly because it doesn't work sometimes. But the last year or so, I've just been doing it with specific timing. So this garlic, we did in April. Again, the timing of disturbance to catch that wave. This row here was ginger and taro. Again, we timed it in the spring of September last year, but right before we got some rains. And it's pretty amazing what you can grow if you time it right. And now what I also wanted to show you was the response, what's happening here. This one's a great example right here. You can see we've got lots and lots of little seedlings. All these little seeds from the seed stock in the beds already, because we're growing lots of things all the time are all bouncing for. So that's a really good indicator that we've got strong soil, but there's lots of weeds coming through as well. And in this pattern, this planting pattern that we've got here, it's maximized, even though it's only like, we've got no long-term stuff in here, we've still placed it out for maximum abundance in this little small zone. So the pattern is every 50 centimeters on the edge, we've got a cabbage and on the other side as well. And then that's interplanted with a broccoli or a brassica or a cauliflower. That's then interplanted with onions. In between that again, we've got like parsley and petunias, so some flowers and some coriander as well. All of them should work really well, even though they're in such a close space, right? The cabbages, brassicas and onions will all take about four to six months. They'll all come out at the same time. The brassicas spaced accordingly, onions in between that, they only grow thin and up. The flowers are there for the good bugs and just to fill the space and give us more seed stock. And they only grow lower to the ground, so they'll fill in those gaps. And we've got coriander and parsley, right? The coriander is going to come out before it's all ready. The parsley is going to live on past everything that gets pulled out. So that'll go for a year or so. And really it's just a mix of stuff that we've just stacked in that will work well for this time of the year. And then I've timed it or we've timed it perfectly with this rainy period and I don't have to irrigate. And what I might do is also, you can see we didn't pull out all the grass, but I just do a little bit of this, keep smashing the grass and that grass will fade out because I'm not going to allow it to fully recover and I'll keep grazing it. Meanwhile, in this bed here, I'm going through, you can see chopping everything back. It's going senescent, all the turmeric's dying back. There's lots of scraggly growth and, you know, it's just inhibiting a lot of photosynthesis and it's going stagnant and senescent. So I'm going to go through, blitz all that, make sure lots of sun is getting through into these rows that I've just planted and really stimulate that growth response. Anyway, a bit of a random meandering video, but I felt like I wanted to share what's going on in our garden and how I'm managing it at this time of the year based on its state of succession.