Hey everyone. I wanted to share a video I posted on YouTube showing a great permaculture urban garden.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
Beautiful Permaculture Garden at The AREA in Inglewood Calgary
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Tag Archives: Australia
how to control pest insects in your garden using your garden
How frustrating is it when you put so much work and effort into a garden, and then like out of nowhere, your plants are nearly ruined from insects munching on them? I’m going to explain how you can control the insects that feed on your precious crops.
blossom!
The key to controlling insects is not pesticide. Pesticide will kill all the beneficial insects and microbes as well. The key is flowers. The effect of the flowers is at least three fold. They confuses insects that will attack your plants, they attract predatory insects, which are also pollinators.
diversify!
The important thing is variety. Scatter your flowers throughout your garden. When I say that, obviously you want to plan so they will be good companions to your other plants, but you want flowers growing along with your vegitables.
Here’s some flowers and plants I would recommend planting:
- A few marigolds (which are good with tomatoes)
- Borage is amazing for attracting bees (give it some space it will spread)
- Sunflowers and bird houses and feeders will attract birds (a bad thing if you have seeds starting, but a great thing if your plants are semi-established (birds will eat the bugs too)
- Herbs like basil, bee balm, catnip, dill, Echinacea, evening primrose, fennel, lavender, parsley, poppy, thyme and sage will all attract pollinators too.
- Check out this site too. It has some great information for specific insects.
The cool thing too is that everything I’ve suggested is edible! However, be warned that not every part of the plants I’ve suggested are edible. Do your research. There’s tons of info out there.
bee houses!
Some other things you could try is making a bee block. This will help support the bee population and give them a home right beside your garden!
They’re as easy as drilling some holes in a block of wood.
http://www.instructables.com/id/mason-bee-hotel/
Let me know what you do to control insects. Also let me know if you’ve tried any of these suggestions before and how they worked for you.
Thanks for reading!
Caleb
Geoff Lawton
I thought I’d start off the day with what a food forrest should look like.
This is a video by PRI (the Permaculture Research Institute) which from where I’m sitting seems to be the leading permaculture educational institute which is lead by Bill Mollison and Geoff Lawton.
I wont be able to do anything close to this magnitude as I only have 2 very small gardens to work with. One is about 150-200 sq/ft at my father’s place, and the other is two strips with about 30 ft in total of planting area at a small seniors condo. I still find this video very inspiring for what I would like to grow in the future.
Enjoy…Caleb
what is permaculture
If you don’t know what permaculture is, you should.
a semi accurate history
Permaculture comes from a combination of the words permanent agriculture. An Austrian dude named Sepp Holzer started using these techniques around the 60s. Then an Australian guy named Bill Mollison around the same time started studying the same techniques. I’m not sure if they knew about each other at the time though. If you’d like to have a more accurate history of it, feel free to check the permaculture wiki site.
what permaculture is to me
I’m not about to go off claiming that permaculture is a religion to me, but I’m sure it is to many people.
To me permaculture is about sustainability, but it’s much more than that. If we use sustainable practices, we’re only maintaining the status quo, however if we use permaculture the way it’s supposed to be used, we can regenerate the world into a much better condition than it is now.
why use permaculture?
• We can repair and deepen the top soil
• We can turn deserts into rain forests
• Provide homes for humans, bugs, bacteria and animals
• Provide wood for homes and fire
• Pull CO2 from the atmosphere
• Remove salt from the dirt
• Remove ground, water and air pollution
All of this is done without the use of chemical fertilizers because you use animals, dead biomass and compost to fertilize your plants. It’s done without having to pay for seeds because you plant perennials as much as possible or you use the seeds you’ve saved from the previous year which aren’t engineered to kill themselves. It’s done with almost no weeding. It’s done using bugs to your advantage rather than killing them all.
Permaculture mimics a forest. You use native perennials as much as possible because they grow like weeds and require almost no attention. You plant nitrogen fixing ground cover which suppresses weeds and fertilizes the soil. All plants are carefully thought out to complement each other.
I hope this gives you an idea of my idea of permaculture, and I would be ecstatic if it inspires you to look into it more.
Thanks for reading.
Caleb