What’s going well?

Been able to step outside of the house and into the garden whenever I feel like a closer look at the garden has been and still is a wonderful thing to be able to do. When I grew a similar type of garden at an allotment site that I would get to see weekly if I was lucky, each time I arrived so much would have changed. Here in the garden, I get to experience all those changes I missed.

Throughout the process of building the design, the evolution of people's reactions has been worth taking note of. At the beginning of the design process when I was starting to dig off the lawn people walking past on the public footpath would stop and give me advice on the type of things I should be planting, it seemed most people enjoyed sharing their own gardening success stories with me. As the design progressed the advice changed to curiosity, people asked what I had planted. From trying to read their reactions I suspected many people thought I was perhaps a little bonkers. Once the garden broke out in full leaf, growing as if it had been here for several years, people showed amazement in how things had grown so well. Of course, my story had not changed, I would once again explain why I had added the contour mounds and planted which plants where and why. All the time continuously introducing them to the word permaculture.

Creating the garden next to a public footpath has been a great opportunity to talk to people about permaculture and something I should look to build upon this next growing season.  

As to the garden itself, what is going well is how the soil is beginning to change. Starting out with a heavy clay soil I knew it would be a few years before its structure would start to change. Already I can see an improvement, with plenty more organic matter in a few more years it should have a very good structure.

The amount of plant growth in the garden these past two years has been quite impressive, whilst at the same time probably my biggest challenge.

What has been challenging?

Chopping back excess plant growth has been very challenging. I just love to see plants grow, the thought of cutting a plant down before it’s at its best is something I need to adapt to doing. With the garden been in such a small space, there is not the room the let everything grow as nature intended it to grow. The comfrey is the best example of this, I know how beneficial it is to cut this plant down before it flowers but I just love to see it in flower. This year the comfrey took over a section of the garden for several weeks.

In the first year, having to water so much due to the very dry early summer was a real pain, this was doubled due to also having the front garden in the same situation. Two new gardens both needing my attention at the same time, it would have probably been better to have done one garden a year over two concurrent years. For both gardens, 2019 I lost the motivation and drive that I started out with. Just the thought of how much work and time I had to invest in both designs in 2018 left me with a slightly bitter taste. Thankfully at the beginning of 2020, that taste is much sweeter again and I'm looking to add a dwarf mulberry and a dwarf fig to the garden.   

What are my long-term vision and goals for this design?

To keep on improving what I have already achieved. My original vision for this design was:

“To be able to forage for a wide selection of berries and herbs both culinary and medicinal from an environment that provides habitat for wildlife and brings calmness to the mind.”

This vision still holds true and I am not there yet.

What are the next achievable steps?

I want to be now looking to add more variety to the herbs I’m growing especially towards medicinal plants. Having that space in the garden that provides me with some privacy from people walking past on the public footpath is something I would like to create. Most of all I need to embrace chopping the more abundant plants back to provide room for others to grow.

Final thoughts on using the Patrick Whitefield framework for permaculture design

I attended a two-week residential PDC at Ragman’s Lane farm with Caroline Aitken as the lead teacher, Caroline teaches Patrick Whitefield framework for permaculture design. I like to use Patrick's framework for my designs because doing so takes my thoughts back to the two weeks I spent taking the PDC in Herefordshire where I’m reminded of all the friends I met along the way. Woven through this design are memories of inspiration, laughing, getting lost, good food, long conversations, and those endless summer days the like I had not experienced since childhood.

Patrick's books have helped me to understand the role observation plays in permaculture designs. Right now, I am sitting in the stone circle, positioned at the highest point in the garden looking over to the castle in the town below. This very moment I’m living inside of all those hours I spent observing and visualizing how I wanted the garden to feel and look. The observations continue, even now I’m visualizing how I can add more layers giving the garden a complexity that calms the mind.

I find myself often living here in the re-evaluation phase where I keep coming back to explore a few of the ideas that I bring back from many long hours spent lost in thought in the garden. Here I can let my thoughts run away adding a little more magic here and there to the garden. Lots of these details were missing in the first design, only when the plants grow do they speak to you. Every time I am in the garden I’m observing and thinking about ways to improve how the garden makes me feel. It’s this journey through my thoughts, calming my mind, allowing me to appreciate how such a small space can make such an impression.

I guess this is why I like using Patrick Whitefield's framework, it flows well for me when I’m thinking about the things I need to consider throughout a design. At the start, I do tend to jump around thinking about the base map, the site survey, and the questionnaire. The second half of the design is where the structure starts to form, moving from the evaluation into the design process and finally into the re-evaluation of the design. As I mentioned, the re-evaluation is where I learn the most, using tools like the SWOC analyses, I get to understand more of what I might have done better from perspectives I would not normally use.

This garden may be small but using the forest garden design technique as a guide has allowed me to think outside the constraints of what would be considered appropriate for a conventional small garden. When I first read Patrick's book “How to Make a Forest Garden” I dreamt about one day having a huge garden and creating my version of what Patrick wrote about in those pages. In reality, along with the high house prices, buying a house with a large garden in Richmond North Yorkshire was far out of my financial reach. Permaculture design is about thinking differently when designing, the only thing stopping me from creating my small version of what Patrick describes a forest garden should be were my beliefs. At the time of writing, I have 6 berry bushes, a goji berry, lots of raspberry canes popping up here and there, a dwarf fig and mulberry, cherry and plum trees both on dwarf rootstock.

The garden is starting to feel like a mini forest where the plants are starting to tell their own stories. At the start of the design, I was not going to have any fruit trees in the garden, now there are two. Observation, observation, and more observation this is what I keep hearing from Patrick's teachings.

To sum all this up, using Patrick Whitefield’s design framework I can lay my thoughts down onto paper to give me a path to follow and once the initial design is complete then the magic begins to take shape.