The Incredible, Edible, Pigeon Pea.
Pigeon pea is a very versatile plant in a sustainable garden because of it’s many uses as food, mulch, green manure, shelter, windbreaks, living trellises, and even firewood. Read on to learn how you can grow it in your garden and benefit from it’s many uses.
The Incredibly Versatile Comfrey Plant
Comfrey is a perennial herb that has many uses in the garden. It has a well-deserved reputation as a super plant amongst organic growers and permaculture practitioners. It’s a nutrient rich ‘chop and drop’ mulch and compost activator, helps to break up compacted soils with its’ thick tuberous roots, can serve as a barrier to spreading grasses and weeds, and the leaves make a potent plant based liquid fertiliser.
The Joys & Benefits of Seed Saving
Saving your own seeds can save you money, create plants better adapted to your local growing conditions and personal tastes, help preserve genetic diversity, and create satisfaction through self-reliance and a closer connection to your food.
Grow Vigorous and Healthy Plants with Beneficial Fungi
Give your fruits and vegetables, lawns, and ornamental plants a secondary root system that is more extensive and efficient than their own to improve nutrient uptake, drought tolerance, and overall health with a beneficial fungus known as mycorrhizal fungi.
Turn Your Lawn into an Instant Garden with Sheet Mulching
Do you want to turn a lawn, weeds, or a patch of bad soil into a garden bed with little to no digging? Sheet mulching is a method that does most of the hard work for you!
Create Incredibly Rich Soil with Chipped Branch Wood
Green manures add short-lived fertility to your soil, but chipped branch wood is a much longer lasting source of organic matter. Combine the two and you’ll create incredibly rich soil!
Grow Your Own Fertiliser with Green Manures
Why buy fertiliser when you can grow it yourself at low cost? The best manure for your garden isn’t manure at all. You can feed your annual and perennial plants and improve the soil in your garden by growing green manures.
Harvest & Store Rainwater with Contour Swales
You already know rainwater is good for your garden and may have noticed how green your plants look after a good rainfall. That’s because rainwater contains nitrogen which “washes out” of the atmosphere, providing your plants with a nutrient boost, giving them their green colour. So it makes sense to catch and store this free resource to irrigate and feed your garden, and one of the best ways to do that is a low-tech do-it-yourself method known as a contour swale.
Create Low Maintenance Garden Beds with Hugelkultur
If you have woody garden waste like fallen trees, branches and shrubs, instead of burning or throwing it out, put it to good use by creating raised garden beds that retain moisture, build soil fertility, and increase drainage. This easy to build garden bed method, used in Eastern Europe for centuries, turns a waste product into delicious fruit and vegetables.
Grow Bananas Easily & Sustainably With Banana Circles
Turn your kitchen or garden waste and excess water into delicious bananas and other crops with an easily constructed and low-maintenance banana circle.
Designing Your Sustainable Garden & Property With Permaculture
By planning your garden or property before developing it, you can save a lot of time, effort, and even money. Permaculture design can help guide you in the planning and design of your sustainable garden and property.
Food Forest Gardening
Food forest gardening offers an innovative, ecologically beneficial model for growing edible crops, timber, fibre, and fuel. By allowing nature to do most of the work, there’s little need for weeding, digging, or controlling insect ‘pests’ in the garden. A healthy system of self-supporting plant communities maintains soil fertility. They don’t have to be huge either, because the ‘forest’ refers to how they are designed, not their size. Their natural appearance is both beautiful and pleasant to be in. With so many benefits, it seems silly not to plant one!