Perennial Answers to a Late Spring Predicament

Spring 2013 in Northern Europe has been slow to arrive, meaning that our annual planting is way behind from the average "norm".  The beds have been prepared to receive their new arrivals.

 This above bed has been prepared, for some time now to receive a polytunnel, which is still not here! The leeks have been planted to the sides to provide a little protection from slugs and snails and interplanted with carrots (below) as they are good companion plants.

 The cherry tree was taken out of it's pot and planted and the small flower bed extended too, we even took out the summer furniture hoping to encourage the spring to hurry up.

 Some of the biennial and perennial plants are doing well.  These below are, wait to be corrected by the brother, blackcurrant.

 The rhubarb is flowering, hmm, and you can just see on the left here some more leeks.  Them be doing very nicely!

 These alliums, spring onion, or i believe in American money they are called salad onions are starting to flower which will enable us to do some seed collecting for next year.

 The brussel sprouts are starting to flower too.

 The raspberry bushes are located in four different spots and all seem to be doing pretty handsomely, you can see all the suckers coming off the one.

 This bed is our first attempt at asparagus, so you'll have to wait for a couple of years to see how these do... update sometime in late 2014, I guess!

 This huge bed which was our onion, potatoes, swede and bean bed will mostly be accommodating corn this year.  We need to be planting in excess of 200 plants in able to do a successful seed collection.

 These two lines hide some of our trees, italian alder and small leaf lime, fast growers, we hope!

 The brassica bed is doing nice, all nicely going to seed.

 The early purple sprouting broccoli is over-taking us a bit, anyone fancy some?

Along the fukuoka beds you can see a couple of Kale plants still doing marvelous, the parsnips looked unbelievably healthy (on the left) and again more leeks.

 The tree nursery is just a brilliant birthing area!  Above you can see a couple dozen transplanted willow of various varieties growing strongly and below the previous years willow is 4-5 feet and will be moved to make our tree bog (a living compost toilet, seriously!) or planted to help with forming more hedgerows.

 The two apple trees shown in previous blogs were chopped up and stacked to season.  These were pretty small trees so we're really excited by the potential wood we have in the downed trees in acre and a half woodland!

It's important to keep moving towards a mainly perennial setup, continually adding diversity to the plant mix so as not to leave us in a position whereby an invasive and damaging intruder could wipe out any variety.  The more perennials we grow, the less we need to do annual beds.  The less annual beds the fewer inputs we have to add back to the living soil.  Careful and clever planting can provide your soil with all the nutrients it needs simply by the selection of different plants that require different growing medium and ensuring that you companion plant those varieties that have beneficial relationships.  Your only input then is to add mulch and compost from your own household and garden wastes!  Nature produces no pollution.  She produces no waste.  We should strive to emulate that as closely as possible.