Ahhhh, this makes me so excited!!! I love planning out my warm season garden! My winter garden ends up being more haphazard but I like to grow so many varieties in the summer and have such a *relatively* small space, I really have to put some thought into plotting out where everything goes. What this doesn’t show are all the marigolds, nasturtiums, and buckwheat patches I throw in-between crops, I tend to sneak in more small herbs here and there too.
Key permaculture techniques used: crop rotation, cover cropping, and intercropping. I always have some experiment going on too. This year I’m trying to grow in straw bales! We’ve got some sunny spots with soil that needs a lot more TLC before it can grow anything (nutrient depleted and extremely compacted) so I’m hoping straw bales will enable us to grow there. We love using straw as mulch, it is my favorite mulch by far for areas I continue to plant in. We then use the spent straw in our compost; since we are in an urban environment that doesn’t have many trees we often run out of brown materials for our compost green:brown ratio, that’s when we use the old straw. So I think the straw bales could fit in nicely to this little cycle. We shall see! I am always learning in the garden, I don’t think I will ever feel like an expert.
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