Kitchen Garden Design Re-Evaluation

October 2019

At the start, we had a garden that was taking away resources through having to maintain a lawn. Now we have a functional garden providing food and wildlife habitat. All this in the space of a couple of years with a little hard work and a well-planned permaculture design. Here we re-evaluate this design using a SWOC analyse to understand the Strengths and Weaknesses of the design, the Opportunities, and the Challenges.

Strengths

After two growing seasons in the garden, I would say the overall design of the garden has worked out very well. The positioning of each of the beds has been a success with the raised bed performing the best. Having a design to follow helped to keep me on track with what I needed to do and when.

After successfully growing oca at the allotment for a few years, I’ve been very pleased to have had an even better growing season in 2018, harvesting a higher quantity of much larger tubers. 2018 was also a good year for courgettes and perennial kale, providing enough to be shared with neighbours. The perennial kale performed better than expected and ended up taking over the whole of the bed.

Having the salad picking raised bed running along next to the front door access path worked out well. During wet weather I could pop out and pick from the path side, leaving the grass side for the drier days. This also worked for anything growing next to the path that was easy picking when it was raining. This is something to consider when planning what to grow where in the coming years.

In 2019 I added a few wire-frames and some canes to add some temporary height into the garden for growing climbers up. The frames added an additional bonus in the way they held back the none climbing plants giving them support and preventing them from falling forwards crowding out anything growing in front. Using frames in this way next year I want to prevent the oca from following the slope and growing downhill, this year they would have grown all the way across the house access path without some intervention to prevent this from happening.

Weaknesses

The quality of the soil was always going to be an area of the garden that would present itself as a weakness, especially for the first few years. Many of the plants could have produced higher returns with greater soil fertility and lighter soil.

Not having a strict planting plan caused many of the same plants to be planted in one area at a too high density. With so many plants in such a small area competition was high often crowding each other out and reducing the overall quality of the crop.

The composting area didn’t get the attention it needed, this presented itself a couple of times with the heap going anaerobic and giving off the most unpleasant of smells.

Having to manually water each evening during the hot dry months in 2018 took time away from other tasks in the garden such as attending to the compost heaps and paying more attention to the plant's needs other than just water.

Having a larger selection of produce would have been of more value to the kitchen.

Opportunities

The areas to improve in the coming years,

Water
Composting/soil fertility
Growing fewer quantities and more varieties

Already part of next year's planned improvements is to set up a water harvesting solution. This year 2019 has been a very wet growing season so the need for extra water has been minimal. That said, investing some time and money into setting up a water harvesting solution will help to remove the reliance the garden has on tap water.

With the recent installation of a large wire cage to store this year’s leaf fall, a better approach to composting can be organized. Looking at my current composting setup, improvements in how I compost are needed. The plan for this is to add a permaculture design with a focus on improving how I’m composting and better ways to add fertility back into the soil. This will go along with a permaculture design based around water harvesting for the garden.

The other main area where I need to improve things is how I’m currently growing. I need to move away from growing too many of the same plants. This year, a great example would be the courgettes and summer squash, I planted far too many, only for them to set fruit then rot off when small. The problem this presented was very little return from about a quarter of the garden. Through better planning, I want to be able to grow fewer quantities and more varieties of plants. Using companion planting and guilds may help to provide better results.

Picking up on some of these previous problems the vision for the next few years is going to be around.

Soil fertility; looking at ways to improve the quality of my own compost and the application of microbial teas on the soil.
Water harvesting; using rainwater runoff from the house roof to water plants and holding water for longer in the soil.
Grow a larger variety of plants, using companion planting and guilds, adding more perennials into the system.

This vision is also laid out as part of the intended design improvements for years three and four.

Challenges

The main challenge the design has highlighted is how much attention the garden needs throughout the year.

Better management of how much of my own time that would be needed to be spent in the garden after the initial setup of the design would have been useful

This presented itself mainly in having to change my own plans at the last moment to accommodate the needs of the garden. Often, I found this very frustrating. The weather was the main element that affected when things in the garden could be done. The lack of a sheltered area to work meant when it rained most planned jobs such as sowing seeds needed to be rearranged, leading to stacking multiple jobs into smaller windows of time.

Going forwards the addition of the greenhouse may help in creating a dry space to work.

Summary

Heading towards the 2020 growing season the motivation to carry on with this design is greater than ever. With the creation of both the water harvesting and the composting and soil fertility designs linking both the front and back garden together, along with the greenhouse design, this the kitchen garden design is integrating extremely well with the permaculture ethics, earth care, people care and fair share along with all the permaculture principles, observe & interact - catch & store energy - obtain a yield - apply self-regulation & accept feedback - use & value renewable resources & services - produce no waste - design from patterns to details - integrate rather than segregate - use small & slow solutions - use & value diversity - use edges & value the marginal - creatively use & respond to change.

April 2018

In April I built the raised bed from repurposed timber as planned in the design. Then digging the lawn off from where our two vegetable beds where to go, I used the grass sod to build up the bottom inside the newly built raised bed. The rest of the space in the bed was filled up with compost brought from the allotment. April also saw the first planting for the design with several perennial kale plants in one of the beds, followed by half of the raised bed been sown with a selection of picking leaves.