This has been an interesting design to work on, I started it when I concluded early in the redesign of the kitchen garden that I need to put more thought into the composting systems I was running. The kitchen garden design turned into a large design needing lots of focus to stay on track.

There were two areas that I just could not include without making the design into a monster that would end up eating me alive. Water harvesting was the other area that was far too complex to think about.  

After mapping out the basics for this soil fertility design I was able to think more logically about the current composting systems than I was doing when they were part of the kitchen garden reloaded design.

In this section of the design process, I will use the PMI design tool to help highlight what has been a plus, a minus, or just interesting in the design. I will follow this with a SWOC report exploring the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges.

 

 

PMI is a brainstorming, decision making and critical thinking tool. It is used to encourage the examination of ideas, concepts and experiences from more than one perspective.

 

 

There have mainly been pluses to this design, by the very nature of the design, looking at ways to improve soil fertility in two gardens that have been in continuous development over the past five years the ideas proposed have arisen from lots of time spent observing the gardens. It took a design to finally gather all these observations together and begin to act. Trying to think about the minus points of the design perhaps highlights the amount of time I’ve thought about doing certain things but never got around to doing them. This PMI evaluation has now made me realise the importance of a design when it comes to putting a bit of a framework together to make sure things get done.   

 

 

SWOC is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Challenges. Here this is used as a tool to focus on the key areas of the design.

 

Strengths

The positions of the composting systems have added great value to the gardens. The locations were also part of the kitchen garden reloaded design. I used this design to look more in-depth at what exactly the gardens needed with regards to composting and if I could reduce the amount of space I was using in the front garden for composting. Through changing my composting methods, I was able to remove the need for space for one heap by improving how I compost.

The summer compost heap certainly benefitted from these improved methods, adding a much wider variety of materials along with turning the heap every few weeks helped to compost much quicker.

Having multiple composting systems, different ways of mulching the garden all add to the long-term sustainability of the soil in the gardens. The aim was to remove the need to have to bring external resources into the garden, I’m well on the way to making this happen.

 

Weaknesses

The main weakness in the design is the limited space of the gardens. It would be great to have had larger compost heaps, providing much more compost to the garden so I could use it much more freely.  

An area that I will need to think about is compost for sowing seeds. This is still a resource that I’m buying in, along with the environmental costs of getting it to the gardens. More research is needed for this to find a solution.

 

Opportunities

Having limited space for composting systems in the garden had made me look at soil fertility from different angles. It has made me think more about the kinds of materials I’m putting into my heaps and what I can add to get more nutrients out of the compost I’m making. This also goes to the wormery. This second year is when I’m going to be adding many more foods to the worms to improve the vermicompost that they produce. I will also be going to be collecting different plants that activate the composting process, along with various plants that provide different nutrients that will go into the main compost heap.

 

Challenges

Last year was another busy year working on permaculture designs, the kitchen garden redesign went on much longer than I would have liked. I never got the chance to focus on the details of this design, yes, I have new and much-improved locations for the composting systems and have improved my composting methods, but it’s been frustrating not to have been able to spend as much time implementing as many of the ideas of this design as I would have liked.   

 

Conclusion

This design is still in its early days, in the coming years I will be able to be more critical with regards to what could have been done better. This coming growing season 2022 will involve experimenting with the different methods laid out in the ideas section. The results will be reflected in the plants and the yields they produce.

To conclude what has been achieved so far has added value to both gardens, value has been added to my life, and all the wildlife that visit the garden looking for food.