Jeff Lawton - Construct a Food Forest

This link is well worth watching... quite long.. around 1hr 22 min... but we're talking ecological engineering here.

http://doomsteaddiary.blogspot.com/2009/03/full-length-permaculture-video.html

Greenhouse

E-Bay has produced again. A greenhouse/conservatory I bid on a couple of weeks ago, and lost, came back to me because the first buyer has let down the purchaser. I'm thrilled to bits and just on my way to collect it.

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It's in pieces of course, so I'll have the worlds biggest mechano puzzle putting it together. Still I've got the photo as a guide.

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It's going to go in front of one of the old out-buildings we're "doing up", so I'll get not only somewhere for my seed planting and propagation, but also free solar heating for the outbuilding... a permaculture classic method.

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Speaking of solar heating; I had a salesman for one of the solar heating companies around yesterday. When I first contacted the company, I told the receptionist that I wasn't ready to buy. I just wanted to talk to someone about the options, but they just can't resist the urge to go for the hard sell. Consequently, the saleman, who might well have had a sale if he'd showed a bit of patience, has defineitly lost the sale through trying too hard. Meanwhile, I have found out what I wanted to know as background information and I'm going to go away and crunch some numbers on how much of a saving we might make on our hot water.

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NB. I'm not even considering the electircity generating version of solar energy. It currently has a pay-back period of about thirty to forty years..... simply not practical or economic.

March; out like a lamb.

Glorious day: warm spring sunshine and just a hint of cool in the breeze. Absolutely no question of staying indoors. We were both out in the garden all day.

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We cleared up another of the areas left to rack and ruin by the previous occupants; all overgrown with thistles and nettles with, what at first appeared to be, some polythene sheeting amoung the weeds.

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It turned out to have been, long ago, an old polytunnel. Everything was collapsed to ground level and overgrown with turf. It was a complete bugger to dig out.

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Still, by the end of the day you could see where we had been. The bulk of the plastic is out anf burned. The usual assortment of stones, brinks and strange random bits of metal were dug out and sorted. We finally managed to get the lawnmower over the area. We'll treat is as law for while until the weeds are under control and then take it from there.

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The E-Bay shredder works a treat. Super machine. All the old tree prunigns are now on the compost heap.

Soil Testing

Early March.... two solid weeks of glorious spring weather.
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So I set out to take advantage of the molehills and start seeding them with my grass/wildflower "For clay soils and wetlands" mix. Also over the areas where the turf and a lot of the topsoil has been trampled out of existence.
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And I resolved that this week I would start my survey of the land.... depth of topsoil (if any!!) type (clay, loam etc) and pH.
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Sodd's Law immediately strikes. The weather turns very windy and with a bitter Northern bite to it.
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Result, my seeds were carried off by the wind, and as I pulled out my carefully assembled and lovingly laminated map of the farm, complete with penned in notes, half a dozen raindrops splodged down onto it and wiped out half my annotations.
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So those jobs will have to wait until the weather clears up.
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On the positive side, E-Bay has now produced a strimmer and a shredder, so I can work on the build up of my compost heaps. I've already got a great stack of tree prunings to work on, plus all the areas where weeds have run riot. not that I want rid of the nettles.... but I do want them under control..... along with the thistles, which are truly out of hand.
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I saw a video on You-Tube a few days ago, showing how a hot shower was run off a compost heap over some months. It's got me wondering if I can get myself a free heated greenhouse run from compost-power. Watch this space.....
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My comfrey arrived yesterday. Fifty bit of chopped off root. The weather won't allow me to plant them, so I've just popeed them into a bit of soil in a seed tray to get them going.

Ducks

Just walked the dogs up by the pond. It looks as thought there is a pair of wild ducks, mallards, starting to nest up there. As I approached with the dogs they flew up together and starting circling. They didn't fly away, but they only came down again until we moved on.
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I hope they stay. I can't stay entirely out of their way unfortunately, so there're going to have to get used to me.
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If they do stay, they will really have an ideal home and nursery; a pond entirely to themselves and twenty odd acres of rough scrubland as a feeding area.

Bare Soil

There's a definite problem on the farmland with bare soil. This is a combination of mole hills and areas where sheer footfall, sheep, vehicles or humans, has stripped away the turf.
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Consequently, thistles are staging a complete take-over bid on the farm. There's thousands of them.
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So I've bought a mixed grass/wildflower seed meadow mixture for wetlands. Everywhere I see naked earth, I'm sowing a little of the seed mixture.
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Next I have to tackle the thistles I've already got.......

A Perfect Storm by 2030

And here are the morning's headlines from The Guardian and the BBC

"Food, water and energy shortages will unleash public unrest and international conflict, Professor John Beddington will tell a conference tomorrow.

A "perfect storm" of food shortages, scarce water and insufficient energy resources threaten to unleash public unrest, cross-border conflicts and mass migration as people flee from the worst-affected regions, the UK government's chief scientist will warn tomorrow"

A Farm for the Future

This is the documentary that originally caught my attention, and that of many others too.




Everyone should watch it

Mulching is a long process.....

This is the area destined to be mulched and planted. The foreground will have brick paths and be laid out as beds for herbs, perennial vegetables, fruit trees and bushes etc.

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The far end will be planted out with comfrey for harvesting as green manure, compost material etc.

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The mulching is on-going as I can lay my hands on cardboard boxes and cheap reclaimed bricks, along with some corrugated iron scavenged from elsewhere and just there as a temporary measure.

As time goes on I will plant directly through the cardboard and then just let it rot into the earth under other more conventional mulches/compost etc.

But it's a slow process.......

Woodpecker at Work

New designer residence under construction. I shall watch progress with interest.......

Frogspawn at Last!

Frogspawn at last. I was beginning to think there was something unhealthy about the pond. but no... half a dozen clumps in the only edge area shallow enough for the spawn. So that's OK. All I need to do is give the pond more shallows.

Birdsong - RSPB Link

Dull and misty this morning, but the kind of mist that looks as though it should burn off with the sun in a couple of hours. But nonetheless, the dawn chorus is in full blow.
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Why do people think the country is a quiet place? The dawn chorus is better than any alarm clock..... sounds better too.
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I finally got around to looking up the RSPB link for listening to the song/call of different bird species. It should help me to identifiy my "LBBs" . Beside the song, the link has an "Bird Identifier" guide

http://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/

The other thing I need to identify is whatever is living in the pond up the hill. The lack of frogs disturbs me. The area should be seething with them. That pond is not ideal for frogs as it is a little too deep at the edges for them to lay their spawn. But there are shallow areas between the marsh grass etc. There should be something there. I'm beginning to wonder if the frogs know something I don't.
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Perhaps I could find a coarse fisherman who can fish the pond and tell me what he catches??

Cardboard Mulching

I have rather a large area in which I need to kill off the weeds before I can start to plant my perennial vegetable/herb garden. The answer is cardboard mulch. I've been hitting the supermarkets for all the cardboard boxes I can get my hands on. I think they think I'm a bit peculiar. When I tell them I want the cardboard as mulch, they look at me as though I've grown an extra head.

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So I'm working my way over the area (about 18m by 36m) with the cardboard and weighing it all down with bricks and a lot of rocks dug out of the general rubbish elsewhere in the garden. I hope and pray that we don't get any mighty winds in the near future. I have nightmares about the whole lot lifting off and settling over the neighbours. I've already apologised in advance to the folks at the back - the plot is going to look really ugly for a few months until I can get on top of this.

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Still, the reason that I have used cardboard is that once down, I will not have to pick it up again. The bricks will be relaid as paths (thank heavens for e-bay - reclaimed bricks at an affordable price!) and I'll plant straight through the cardboard. As I get the compost bins going and the comfrey growing, I will then be able to mulch with something rather more attractive and nutritious.

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Why so little frogspawn in the area? One scrawny blob in the pond at the front. One blob in a ditch up the hill, and no more. This area should be crawling with frogs. Where are they????

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To the list of local birds, I can add jackdaws and curlews. The local rook population seems very healthy indeed. There are two rookeries within a mile and there are more rooks to be seen every day.... hundreds of them....

Comfrey and exposed soil

I've ordered a lot of comfrey plants today... I say plants... I suspect they'll each be a couple of inches of root cutting, but that's fine. There's fifty of them coming, but by the time they have grown up and I've split them up a couple of times, there will be plenty to fill the space (about 30m by 16m). That should keep me in green manure for a long time to come.

I've ordered them to arrive mid to end of April. The area is overgrown with weeds right now and I want the chance to get the site cleared. Next week I'm going to start combing the local supermarkets for cardboard boxes to use as a weed-killing mulch. That should give me a month for the weeds to weaken before I plant the comfrey rots through the mulch.

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I also ordered a batch of meadow grass/wildflower seed. It's only a kilogram of seed, but my main interest right now is to cover the areas of naked soil revealed either by being ploughed up by the over-wintering sheep ploughing up the turf, the walkers on the footpaths wearing through the turf, or by the ministrations of our local moles....... it actually works for me. Most farmers detest moles for revealing bare soil, but I want to start diversifying the plant life a bit. The areas of bare soil are not huge, but if the plant life can get a foothold.....

The flower/grass mix is just a standard "for wetland" mix. I didn't add any "specials". I'm mainly interested in increasing diversity generally while I research detail on what might be specifically useful....... an I need to cover that bare earth, before more thistles move in.

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The thistles need to be dealt with....if I leave them to it they will take over the farm. Perhaps goats? Donkeys? What likes thistles but won't destroy everything else? Goats can be tethered of course..... but I don't like tethering animals.......
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I have a draft layout now for the "herb patch". It's a bit ambitious and semi-formal, but it should both produce the plants I want and look utterly beautiful. And it's right next to the comfrey patch. I'll scan my sketches and add them to another post. But I am going to need a lot of bricks for footpaths.
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Now where can I get that many bricks?????? E-Bay here I come....

Dynamic Accumulators

Having been reading around quite a bit, the plan for the site is gradually taking form.

The big stuff, field trees etc I'll not do anything about until next winter. By then, I'll have a map of exactly what I want to plant where and I can actually do it in the dormant season, but there's no reason why some of the small plantings can't happen pretty much right away, or at least when it's warm enough that I don't freeze my bits off trying to plant.

The far end of the current garden area is "fallow". There's an area of about 80 meters by 20 that was once a bed used for growing dahlias but which has just gone weedy over the last two years. The first part of the job is to cover/mulch over the whole area to kill off the weeds. I'm really regretting all those old carpets I burned.

Still, I'm knee deep in old cardboard boxes. They will do nicely as a mulch. I'll do a ground cover with those. They will kill the weeds and then rot away in due course.

The far end of that plot I'm going to turn over to comfrey and other dynamic accumulators. These are plants that will "mine" nutrients from deep levels within the sub-soil, bringing them up into their own tissues. The plant can then be harvested, and in the case of comfrey, put straight down as mulch, without even the need for composting. The nutrients obtained this way then beneift the other plants that are so "manured".

It's an area of about 40m by 20m and should keep me in green manure for some time to come.

The near end of the plot, and the part mainly visible from the house, is going to be a semi-formal herb garden. By semi formal I mean that the pathways will be laid out in bricks in some formal pattern, but the plants in the gaps between can do the "squeeze in and cover the soil routine". I can plant them stright through the cardboard and make it all look a bit more aesthetic with the comfrey manure on top of the cardboard

The bricks themselves I can scavenge from some junk heaps I found around the back of one of the old buildings, although I will probably have to find more bricks with the size of the area to cover. I think I can set them right on top of the cardboard and let them settle. Later on they may need levelling, but I'll tackle that at the time.

Permaculture Project Progress

Another glorious morning in paradise. Crisp frost, melting almost as the sun kissed the grass, and air fresh enough to make you want to do nothing in life but breath it.

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The gorse has been trying to flower in a patchy kind of way ever since Christmas. But now it's really trying. I'm looking forward to when the air warms up and it fills the air with the smell of coconut.

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The woodpeckers were playing at headbangers today. I couldn't see them, but at the top of the hill I could hear two of them "chatting" with that da-da-da of theirs. .

Weighing up what you got to work with when the land is hilly is pretty difficult. And on 60 acres, it's almost impossible to see some of the detail when you're too close to it. So I've been trying to conduct a kind of photgraphic survey

Funny how, when taking a photo, no matter what the view is, there's a dog in the way..... until you want a dog in the picture, and then there's not a canine to be seen.

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It's not very successful though. The photos can be breathtaking, but the sheer scale of trying to catch the whole landscape in one shot just makes the job impractical.

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So instead I've assembled a map/aerial view of the area taken from on-line images. It was quite a bit of work to put it all together, but the resulting composite has come out splendidly well. It's quite stunning what can be seen of a landscape from the aerial perspective.... ancient ridge and furrow, old ditches, hedges and boundaries which are marked on maps but are invisible at ground level. Utterly fascinating! I got the whole thing laminated in A1 size. Pricy, but well worth it. I've got a super working tool now.

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While I was out, I picked up a PH testing kit while I was at it. Let's see what kind of soil we have. Lots of clay, but what else?

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As I drove back from Cheltenham, a kestral dropped out of the sky right in front of me to the verge, and some small innocent sqeaky thing became lunch. It was one of those two second events that take your breath away. The bird plummented down, and with absolute accuracy struck at the ground. It looked as though it should be certain impact, but it just flapped about whilst it subdued its prey. I'd have thought the poor little beast would have been stunned just from the speed of the impact, but it seemed to be putting up a fight.... not very successfully. I tried to slow down to see the follow on, but it's main road, and the kestral didn't look happy about having me as an audience either.

Mistletoe

Funny stuff mistletoe. Except for hanging over Christmas stockings, I'd never seen it at all until I moved to Gloucestershire, and now I see it everywhere.

Some trees it doesn't seem to touch, and others there seems to be more mistletoe than tree, and that's not just species. I'd always thought (from what I'd read) that mistletoe grew on oaks, or sometimes apples. Well round here, it certainly likes apples, but I've not seen it yet on oaks. I have seen it on hawthorn, poplars and ash, but not oak or willow.

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Just before Christmas a couple of ne'er do wells rolled up here in a battered white van an announced that they were "Clearing the mistletoe out of the hedgerows" and did I want then to clear out mine?

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They must have thought I'd come up with the morning's mushrooms......

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It is interesting to look at.... it's got me quite fascinated.... but I'm not aware of any actual use for it (unless you count druidic fertility rites......).

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The Plants for the Future Database tells me that all its parts are slightly poisoness, and they rate it 1 out of 5 for usefulness.

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Ah well...... at least it looks pretty.

Robert Hart - Forest Garden

Two excellent films on Forest Gardening in Shropshire

Introduction



Design of a Forest Garden

PERMACULTURE & PEAK OIL: Beyond 'Sustainability'

A YouTube film in which David Holmgren, the co-originator (with Bill Mollison) of the permaculture concept and author of the recent book, PERMACULTURE: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. He talks about the need to move beyond the lulling hope that 'green tech' breakthroughs will allow world-wide 'sustainable consumption' to the recognition that dwindling oil supplies inevitably mean a mandatory 'energy descent' for human civilization across the planet. He argues that permaculture principles provide the best guide to a peaceful societal 'powering down."

Spring Today.

Winter is beginning to release it's grip. After the blisteringly cold periods between November and February, it warmed just a bit for a few days.... enough to fool me.... and then popped back around the corner last week to bite at my fingers and nip my nose when I took the dogs up the hill.

But today is lovely. It started with a bite to the air and frost silvering the hilltop, then the sun melted away the chill and suddenly the air smelled of clean soil and sunshine.

The buzzards are back. I know it doesn't sound very romantic, but I became rather attached to them last Autumn, and an area that supports six top predators can't be entirely unhealthy. Certainly I found plenty of pigeon feathers in the hedgerows last summer. Over winter they vanished. I must check up on what they do/where they go in winter.

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Listening to "Farming Today" over the last few days, they've been reporting on the RSPB's annual farmland bird count. They use 20 signature species as a proxy for general diversity. The which the skylark is one of these. As I walked by the pond, a pair suddenly flushed out from the marshgrass. I must try to track how many pairs we have. Again, today is the first time I've seen them this year, although to be fair, it's been so bloody cold that I seldom got past the lower fields over the last few months.

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The list makes interesting reading. This is taken from the DEFRA report "Wild bird population indicators for the English regions: 1994 – 2006" I'm going to try to contribute to this for future years. My main problem is that the two lists includes a number of "LBBs" (little brown birds) and I'm not sure that my identification skills are up to dealing with those.

Farmland List

Corn Bunting, Goldfinch, Greenfinch, Grey Partridge, Jackdaw, Kestrel, Lapwing, Linnet, Reed Bunting, Rook, Skylark, Starling, Stock Dove,Tree Sparrow, Turtle Dove, Whitethroat, Woodpigeon, Yellowhammer, Yellow Wagtail, Marsh Tit, Nightingale, Nuthatch, Redstart, Robin, Song Thrush, Sparrowhawk, Spotted Flycatcher, Tawny Owl, Tree Pipit, Treecreeper, Willow Tit, Willow Warbler, Wood Warbler, Wren

Woodland List

Blackbird, Blackcap, Blue Tit, Bullfinch, Chaffinch, Chiffchaff, Coal Tit, Dunnock, Garden Warbler, Goldcrest, Great Spotted Woodpecker, Great Tit, Green Woodpecker, Hawfinch, Jay, Lesser Spotted Woodpecker, Whitethroat, Lesser Redpoll, Lesser Whitethroat, Long-tailed Tit, Marsh Tit, Nightingale, Nuthatch, Redstart, Robin, Song Thrush, Sparrowhawk, Spotted Flycatcher, Tawny Owl, Tree Pipit, Treecreeper, Willow Tit, Willow Warbler, Wood Warbler, Wren

Still, some of them we certainly have at Vine Tree Farm. Since the land is farmland edging onto woodland, I'll track both lists.

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I'll keep up a running report on this. So far I can definitely say that we have:

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Farmland List

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Skylarks (at least one pair), rooks and wood pigeons.

Woodland List

Blackbird, blue tit, chaffinch, some variety of woodpecker, robin, dunnock.

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When I've brushed up my identification skills I should add more. In the meantime, I'll read the report.

First Post - Permaculture

A lot has happened in the last few months. We finally managed to move to the farm last August and then had a brief couple of months of glorious sunshine before Winter moved in.

And of course Sodd's Law says that in the year when you've no central heating and the lighting is dodgy, that's when you get the coldest Winter for a generation.

Ye Gods but it was cold. I almost gave up cooking because it was so bitter in the kitchen that if I stayed in there long enough to cook, my fingers were so cold that it hurt.

But now Spring is, if not here, at least poking its head around the corner.

And last week I watched a TV program I considered truly revolutionary; "A Farm for the Future", by Rebecca Hoskin (famous for persuading her home town to do away with plastic bags)part of the BBC's Natural world series. Why they tucked away an important program like this in some out of the way spot on BBC2 is beyond me. They should have put it Prime Time BBC1 and shouted from the rooftops that everyone should watch it.

I see from the "Points of view" postings that there's plenty out there besides myself who think this way, and there were a number of requests to release it as a DVD.

So what was it about? Click on this for the Mail On-Line accompanying article, "Now my farm will teach the world to live without oil"

The starting point for Rebecca's argument is that experts in the field are all agreed that the "peak oil" point (i.e. "the point when the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.") is all but upon us, if we have not even reached it already. From that point, oil production will fall by around 2-3% per year.

And our entire agricultural system is completely dependent on oil. What will we eat when we can't rely on oil?

I'll not go into vast detail here. She explains it much better than I, and you would be better to read the article link above. But the answer put forward is a method of farming very different to what we now use: Permaculture

And this is where I become suddenly excited. Because is where I can genuinely contribute and do something truly useful.

Our farm is not large, a little over 60 acres. But it is ideal for this form of farming, some will call it gardening.

Permaculture is a form of agriculture in which rather than relying on traditional methods of ploughing, planting and harvesting fields, the land becomes permanently planted with useful plants, in layers from ground cover to tree tops and including shrub layers and the under-soil beneficial fungi.

Land used in this way is vastly more fertile and productive than when used in the traditional way.

And moving away from monocultures means that such plantings are robust against disease and pest. The rise of a new wheat virus could currently wipe out major portions of the world's/humanity's food supply, because only limited numbers of varieties of wheat are grown. But no one pest or disease could destroy a developed permaculture system of many species. Some plants might fail, but others would survive. The eggs are in several baskets.

And so, my beautiful Gloucestershire farm is going to "go permaculture".

I've a lot of reading to do, and some courses to attend. I've been walking the fields and hill marking out in my mind where are the ditches and the ancient trees? Where are the marshy areas? Where might the marshes be developed into ponds and how can the water be most usefully be used for the environment? How can I extend the fruit orchards? Where should I plant trees to firm up land slippage?

I'm working on it.