A permaculture garden is a garden design where we model Nature for success.
It doesn’t have the pristine look that we usually see from modern gardens.
Instead, you’ll find dead leaves, piles of branches everywhere – a somewhat untidy sight actually, if you’re not used to it.
But what you can also have from a permaculture garden are abundant organic harvest, fresh eggs, a very healthy soil and a beautiful garden teaming with wildlife, from bees, butterflies, birds to frogs and different reptiles for minimal input.
At least, that’s what the plan is.
I took an Organic Agriculture course from UPOU in August 2014 and although technically, this is for the year 2015, I feel that it’ll be easier to understand if I presented what we did in the garden right from the very beginning, while I took the class.
So, here are the photos of our main projects during the first year in the garden:
The lot that I picked for the garden in August has been a dumping site of garbage and other construction materials for many years. I hired a couple of guys to clear the area for our heap compost (photo) and first seedlings. We did other kinds of composting in this month too.
Nitrogen-fixing legumes are among the first seeds that we planted in the garden. We also got a jeep load full of rice straw from a nearby farm and distributed them around as mulch, as you can see in the photo. I later learned in class that I should’ve checked if the rice farm was organic, which I didn’t.
This is me – a scarecrow in a garden of string beans and mustasa! I can give you a million excuses how my makeup became like that, but not now. ^_^ The mustasa greens are the first vegetable harvest we ever had. The string beans in the photo didn’t do well, unfortunately.
I didn’t get to do much in the garden by November. We had lot of things going on at work and I was also finishing up the organic class. But I got to bring home different herbs and flower seedlings, from my class trips to Los Banos where they have a larger variety of seedlings for sale. The moss rose in the photo, is from a plant shop in Gulang-gulang. And we set up water dishes for the wild birds too.
Tomatoes! I wrote a post a while back on how you can start your own vegetable garden – where you can buy seeds, the basic tools you need and so on.
Our heap compost was ready for sieving in January. When I started the garden, my number one restriction is to always recycle things first before purchasing, so I was ecstatic when I saw this free compost for our soil, all from garden waste!
The photo is from a garden I saw in Green Meadows subdivision. You can find out what flowers are easy to grow by looking at and taking notes of the home gardens around here in Lucena. Flowers will attract beneficial insects that will help pollinate your plants for better harvest. Did you know that some weeds are also food for beneficial insects as well? So let’s not be too quick to pull plants from the garden.
We had lots of bamboo projects for the garden in March, from vegetable trellises, gates to a chicken coop. Bamboos are abundant, very useful and sustainable.
In April, we built a brush pile in the garden to provide shelter for wildlife. It is basically a pile of branches that you can hide somewhere in your garden that don’t get much human traffic. There’s probably about 10 bangkalangs that live in our brush pile right now, apart from the birds that we usually find hanging around. I occasionally find monitor lizards too.
In May, we made the garden more comfortable for people who visit, from sitting areas, foot path and rain shelter. This was my view when I sat down on one of our benches.
Swales are important in a permaculture garden. Unfortunately, I misunderstood a lot of things so this didn’t work. So I will post something once we were able to build one. The rainwater collection system made of recycled drums that we set up a couple of years ago are still working.
Chicken eggs? Yes!
This is one area of our garden. We usually plant legumes and flowers first as we conquer an area. Once established, like in this case, we will start planting vegetables. Today, we already grew Ampalaya and Upo near the 1st and 3rd bamboo poles in the photo. No more straws in there too.
September saw us transplanting wild plants throughout the garden. We took note of the “weeds” that every animal visitors eat and we let them grow in appropriate places in the garden. That’s a photo of Marya Marya (Passiflora foetida) which the wild birds including our chickens, love. They have pretty flowers that the bees seem to like too.
Every day is butterfly day in the garden except when it’s raining. It’s amazing to me that you can always find butterflies in the garden these days.
These are Upo fruit and Patola flowers in the trellis. The flowers of Upo and Patola are pollinated mostly by the bees that visit our garden. We’ve had plenty of harvest this year that we still ended up selling a few, after giving most of them away. (Total Harvest: 116 pcs of Patola and 19 pcs of Upo as of December 27, 2015)
And lastly for the year 2015, this is a photo of our current experiment – a Fermented Fruit Juice (FFJ) for the garden. You can create different organic sprays like FFJ and FPJ (P for plant) that can help your plants flower and produce fruits.
And that’s about it. We only did 1 core activity for each month and our garden went from the photo on the left below to the one in the right.
These below are our harvests and some pets we got:
As the year ends, I look at this permaculture garden and it does give me hope, that amidst the environmental problems that our world is facing, a 3-man team effort (sometimes 2, sometimes 1 in some months) and nature can produce something like what we currently have.
Permaculture gardening is one of the best answers that I found when I began searching for what I can do. I feel like it’s something I have to share, in case you get inspired too.
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